Posts Tagged ‘European Council’

Or the building of the new total mass surveillance states in the “democratic” west.

The summer is finally here after, again, being a cold winter and “spring”. Isn’t it “lovely” with this “accelerated warming” that sorry to say is not going on?

I want to wish every one of you a warm, in the name of Global Warming Hysteria, and nice summer. It will also mean that I will write less and more sporadic posts.

But you have 1193 posts and 2661 comments to go through at your leisure.

One theme of this blog has been to expose governments and the political elites attack on freedom and their aspiration and strive for total control of their citizen. The Global Warming Hysteria fits like a hand in a glove this agenda under the pretext of “saving mankind” from a non-existent “threat”,

The increasing and relentless drive of western governments for control of every aspect of their citizen’s life and against freedom of all kinds. And the mainstream medias/old media part in these efforts.

Which make a TOTAL MOCKERY of all the beautiful words in their constitutions and the official declarations by all politicians.

Not to mentions these governments signing of the UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the Council of Europe’s Convention for the Protection of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms and the EU: s Charter of Fundamental Rights.

All these governments are in TOTAL BREACH of these signed treaties and their constitutions every second of the day.

And it is getting worse under one pretext after another. The most ingenious and hypocritical is that “they”, the ALL knowing and wise political elite, want “to protect us” from one thing after another.

Well, by this definition a slave is very “protected” and “safe”.

Oxford Dictionaries:

•Slave – a person who is excessively dependent upon or controlled by something

And remember these wise words that not many pay attention to anymore:

“All tyranny needs to gain a foothold is for people of good conscience to remain silent.”

Thomas Jefferson

So instead of me writing about the same thing again here are some excerpts and additions on these themes.

And I recommend that you read the rest of this post, ponder about it, and then come back and answer this question:

Are YOU going to behave like a sheep and voluntarily accept and give away your freedom and privacy for nothing? Or are you going to do something about it?

“I just went through the stats for my blog and as usual, I am blown away by the true international phenomenon this is. In the last month, I had visitors from 148 countries. (Last month it passed 155)

WOW!

And I don’t say this to be bragging. As I said before I am just blown away by what a true and awesome international phenomena blogging is. Especially when considering that I don’t have the time to actively promote this blog.

And as I said before, that’s why the powers that be fear the “free” internet so much. They have so far no gained the control they want. That’s why they do everything possible to regulate and stop it through various direct and indirect means.

Sadly, a lot of politicians and governments in the “free” world are willingly taking part in that onslaught. In fact, in some cases they are leading it.

What is also very interesting to watch is how the Mainstream Media/Old Media has reacted to the fact that today the blogosphere is doing most of the investigative journalism. Doing the “digging” and exposing uncomfortable facts for politicians, business and “scientists” that the Mainstream Media stopped doing a long time ago.

First, the reaction was to totally ignore the blogosphere. Pretend that it didn’t exist. When that was no longer possible. The reaction was one of attack. “Don’t think you can come here and teach us anything because we know best and always will”. They tried to put themselves on a pedestal “Because we are the REAL journalists”. We know what’s best for the people etc.

And most of the Mainstream Media/Old Media is still sadly there. Their arrogance is so ludicrous and stupefying that it is numbing.

Watching journalist describe ”things” is like watching a man being on a ”High Horse”, in his own “very important bubble” with NO contact with the real world whatsoever. It’s a fascinating spectacle.

I have been saying for a very, very long time that if you want to understand what is going on in the world and in your own country, DON’T watch the news on TV or read the newspapers. It is a total waste of time.

If you do, you understand less after watching/reading than before.

For the last say 40 years, there has been a steady decline in what used to be called “journalism”. Especially investigative journalism. Instead, it has been replaced by journalist and media that are driven by a political agenda. On purpose.

It is about controlling and setting the agenda. Not about reporting the facts. Or presenting the facts so that people understands what is REALLY going on and how that affect them. And hopefully make better choices.

They will ONLY print “news” that fits their agenda. If it does not, it doesn’t exist and never ever happened.

The Mainstream Medias/Old Medias deafening silence on many subjects, and their PC worldview is as far away from journalism that you can come.

Most of the Mainstream Media/Old Media has willingly and gladly become “His Masters Voice”. Even worse, the Mainstream Media/Old Media has willingly taken part in actively censoring and suppressing facts. A very sad fact for the democracy and an utter betrayal of what journalism is supposed to be.

You will find many examples of this betrayal in this blog. So, instead on being the defender and bearer of freedom of speech, the Mainstream Media/Old Media has become the slayer of it. “

“It is a very sad day indeed to see a people voluntarily decide to throw themselves and their country over the cliff.

The result, the US government is legally bound to spend more money on mandatory entitlements and interest than it can raise in tax revenue. It will not make any difference how high the federal, state or local government raise taxes, or even if they cut everything.

Another effect of Obama economics is that the poor are getting poorer, especially the black. Under Obama the poorest Americans has suffered the single largest drop in income ever.

And the Black Americans in the same lowest income quintile have suffered almost double as the average American in the same quintile under Obama:

The drop is– 11.58% in one year(2010) and is at the lowest level ever.

That’s what I call “change”!But I would not call it “hope”.

And the number of people classified as poor are getting larger and larger.

Then on top of that, we have the equally disastrous foreign policy. Where the Obama administration systematically have thrown their former allies (Eastern Europe, Britain, Israel, Egypt, Saudi Arabia etc) under the bus, and helped parties like the Muslim Brotherhood that hate everything that USA and the western world stands for, to power.

See my 19 posts on Syria etc as some examples of that disastrous foreign policy:

But as the old saying goes (Joseph de Maistre in a letter from St Petersburg August 1811): a country has the politicians/government that they deserve. So enjoy!

In addition, this quote from a reader’s commentary in The Prager Zeitung in March 2010 (translated from Czech) sums it up quite well really:

“Multitude of Fools

The danger to America is not Barack Obama but a citizenry capable of entrusting a man like him with the Presidency. It will be far easier to limit and undo the follies of an Obama presidency than to restore the necessary common sense and good judgment to a depraved electorate willing to have such a man for their president.

The problem is much deeper and far more serious than Mr. Obama, who is a mere symptom of what ails America. Blaming the prince of the fools should not blind anyone to the vast confederacy of fools that made him their prince. The Republic can survive a Barack Obama, who is, after all, merely a fool.

It is less likely to survive a multitude of fools such as those who made him their president.“

The even worse sorry state of USA – The mass surveillance of the American people:

And its get worse, on top of the above the “recent” discoveries of the TOTAL MASS SURVELIANCE IN REAL TIMR OF ALL THE AMERICAN PEOPLE (and their electronic communication).

And of course ALL TRAFFIC passing through American servers. This is 60-80% of ALL the internet traffic (depending of which type of traffic).

And that the big internet companies/software companies besides collecting and selling ALL the user information to other companies is ALSO in REAL TIME colleting and “sharing” ALL this data with US government agencies.

And these agencies store this information, your whole electronic and internet life,FOREVER. To be used at their whim in 10 or 20 or 40 years from now, if the powers that be thinks that you are a “threat” or in some way “interfering” with their agenda.

And this TOTAL MASS SURVELIANCE isn’t of course limited to the US. A lot of that is going on in EU countries too. And others.

For example, there is a very, very tight cooperation and sharing that goes way back (1946) between USA, Canada, UK, Australia and New Zeeland. And the Swedish FRA takes part in this cooperation. The “famous” ECHELON was an offspring of this cooperation.

This is way I started to put this sign after each blog post when the Swedish FRA started collecting data from ALL internet traffic passing Swedish borders on January 1st 2009.

And the absurd thing is that this TOTAL MASS SURVELIANCE WILL NOT ACCOMPLISH what is said to be the pretext for it – catching terrorists.

But of course it is excellent for controlling your own people and intimidating them.

Especially now when these agencies store this information, your whole electronic and internet life,FOREVER. To be used at their whim in 10 or 20 or 40 years from now, if the powers that be thinks that you are a “threat” or in some way “interfering” with their agenda.

And that’s why they are putting so much money and personal into these efforts, and trying so desperately to conceal this TOTAL MASS SURVELIANCE state from their own citizens.

“The top-secret world the government created in response to the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, has become so large, so unwieldy and so secretive that no one knows how much money it costs, how many people it employs, how many programs exist within it or exactly how many agencies do the same work.

These are some of the findings of a two-year investigation by The Washington Post that discovered what amounts to an alternative geography of the UnitedStates, a Top Secret America hidden from public view and lacking in thorough oversight. After nine years of unprecedented spending and growth, the result is that the system put in place to keep the United States safe is so massive that its effectiveness is impossible to determine.

The investigation’s other findings include:

* Some 1,271 government organizations and 1,931 private companies work on programs related to counterterrorism, homeland security and intelligence in about 10,000 locations across the United States.

* An estimated 854,000 people, nearly 1.5 times as many people as live in Washington, D.C., hold top-secret security clearances.

* In Washington and the surrounding area, 33 building complexes for top-secret intelligence work are under construction or have been built since September 2001. Together they occupy the equivalent of almost three Pentagons or 22 U.S. Capitol buildings – about 17 million square feet of space.

* Many security and intelligence agencies do the same work, creating redundancy and waste. For example, 51 federal organizations and military commands, operating in 15 U.S. cities, track the flow of money to and from terrorist networks.

* Analysts who make sense of documents and conversations obtained by foreign and domestic spying share their judgment by publishing 50,000 intelligence reports each year – a volume so large that many are routinely ignored.

These are not academic issues; lack of focus, not lack of resources, was at the heart of the Fort Hood shooting that left 13 dead, as well as the Christmas Day bomb attempt thwarted not by the thousands of analysts employed to find lone terrorists but by an alert airline passenger who saw smoke coming from his seatmate.”

They are also issues that greatly concern some of the people in charge of the nation’s security.

”There has been so much growth since 9/11 that getting your arms around that – not just for the CIA, for the secretary of defense – is a challenge,” Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates said in an interview with The Post last week.

In the Department of Defense, where more than two-thirds of the intelligence programs reside, only a handful of senior officials – called Super Users – have the ability to even know about all the department’s activities. But as two of the Super Users indicated in interviews, there is simply no way they can keep up with the nation’s most sensitive work.

”I’m not going to live long enough to be briefed on everything” was how one Super User put it. The other recounted that for his initial briefing, he was escorted into a tiny, dark room, seated at a small table and told he couldn’t take notes. Program after program began flashing on a screen, he said, until he yelled ”Stop!” in frustration.

”I wasn’t remembering any of it,” he said.

Underscoring the seriousness of these issues are the conclusions of retired Army Lt. Gen. John R. Vines, who was asked last year to review the method for tracking the Defense Department’s most sensitive programs. Vines, who once commanded 145,000 troops in Iraq and is familiar with complex problems, was stunned by what he discovered.

”I’m not aware of any agency with the authority, responsibility or a process in place to coordinate all these interagency and commercial activities,” he said in an interview. ”The complexity of this system defies description.”

The result, he added, is that it’s impossible to tell whether the country is safer because of all this spending and all these activities. ”Because it lacks a synchronizing process, it inevitably results in message dissonance, reduced effectiveness and waste,” Vines said. ”We consequently can’t effectively assess whether it is making us more safe.”

“But in the end, analysis requires human judgment, and half the analysts are relatively inexperienced, having been hired in the past several years, said a senior ODNI official. Contract analysts are often straight out of college and trained at corporate headquarters.

When hired, a typical analyst knows very little about the priority countries – Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan and Pakistan – and is not fluent in their languages. Still, the number of intelligence reports they produce on these key countries is overwhelming, say current and former intelligence officials who try to cull them every day. The ODNI doesn’t know exactly how many reports are issued each year, but in the process of trying to find out, the chief of analysis discovered 60 classified analytic Web sites still in operation that were supposed to have been closed down for lack of usefulness. ”Like a zombie, it keeps on living” is how one official describes the sites.

The problem with many intelligence reports, say officers who read them, is that they simply re-slice the same facts already in circulation. ”It’s the soccer ball syndrome. Something happens, and they want to rush to cover it,” said Richard H. Immerman, who was the ODNI’s assistant deputy director of national intelligence for analytic integrity and standards until early 2009. ”I saw tremendous overlap.”

Even the analysts at the National Counterterrorism Center (NCTC), which is supposed to be where the most sensitive, most difficult-to-obtain nuggets of information are fused together, get low marks from intelligence officials for not producing reports that are original, or at least better than the reports already written by the CIA, FBI, National Security Agency or Defense Intelligence Agency.

When Maj. Gen. John M. Custer was the director of intelligence at U.S. Central Command, he grew angry at how little helpful information came out of the NCTC. In 2007, he visited its director at the time, retired Vice Adm. John Scott Redd, to tell him so. ”I told him that after 41/2 years, this organization had never produced one shred of information that helped me prosecute three wars!” he said loudly, leaning over the table during an interview.

Two years later, Custer, now head of the Army’s intelligence school at Fort Huachuca, Ariz., still gets red-faced recalling that day, which reminds him of his frustration with Washington’s bureaucracy. ”Who has the mission of reducing redundancy and ensuring everybody doesn’t gravitate to the lowest-hanging fruit?” he said. ”Who orchestrates what is produced so that everybody doesn’t produce the same thing?

He’s hardly the only one irritated. In a secure office in Washington, a senior intelligence officer was dealing with his own frustration. Seated at his computer, he began scrolling through some of the classified information he is expected to read every day: CIA World Intelligence Review, WIRe-CIA, Spot Intelligence Report, Daily Intelligence Summary, Weekly Intelligence Forecast, Weekly Warning Forecast, IC Terrorist Threat Assessments, NCTC Terrorism Dispatch, NCTC Spotlight . . .

It’s too much, he complained. The inbox on his desk was full, too. He threw up his arms, picked up a thick, glossy intelligence report and waved it around, yelling.

”Jesus! Why does it take so long to produce?”

”Why does it have to be so bulky?”

”Why isn’t it online?”

The overload of hourly, daily, weekly, monthly and annual reports is actually counterproductive, say people who receive them. Some policymakers and senior officials don’t dare delve into the backup clogging their computers. They rely instead on personal briefers, and those briefers usually rely on their own agency’s analysis, re-creating the very problem identified as a main cause of the failure to thwart the attacks: a lack of information-sharing.”

“Because so much is classified, illustrations of what goes on every day in Top Secret America can be hard to ferret out. But every so often, examples emerge. A recent one shows the post-9/11 system at its best and its worst.

Last fall, after eight years of growth and hirings, the enterprise was at full throttle when word emerged that something was seriously amiss inside Yemen. In response, President Obama signed an order sending dozens of secret commandos to that country to target and kill the leaders of an al-Qaeda affiliate.

In Yemen, the commandos set up a joint operations center packed with hard drives, forensic kits and communications gear. They exchanged thousands of intercepts, agent reports, photographic evidence and real-time video surveillance with dozens of top-secret organizations in the United States.

That was the system as it was intended. But when the information reached the National Counterterrorism Center in Washington for analysis, it arrived buried within the 5,000 pieces of general terrorist-related data that are reviewed each day. Analysts had to switch from database to database, from hard drive to hard drive, from screen to screen, just to locate what might be interesting to study further.

As military operations in Yemen intensified and the chatter about a possible terrorist strike increased, the intelligence agencies ramped up their effort. The flood of information into the NCTC became a torrent.

Somewhere in that deluge was even more vital data. Partial names of someone in Yemen. A reference to a Nigerian radical who had gone to Yemen. A report of a father in Nigeria worried about a son who had become interested in radical teachings and had disappeared inside Yemen.

These were all clues to what would happen when a Nigerian named Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab left Yemen and eventually boarded a plane in Amsterdam bound for Detroit. But nobody put them together because, as officials would testify later, the system had gotten so big that the lines of responsibility had become hopelessly blurred.

”There are so many people involved here,” NCTC Director Leiter told Congress.

”Everyone had the dots to connect,” DNI Blair explained to the lawmakers. ”But I hadn’t made it clear exactly who had primary responsibility.”

And so Abdulmutallab was able to step aboard Northwest Airlines Flight 253. As it descended toward Detroit, he allegedly tried to ignite explosives hidden in his underwear. It wasn’t the very expensive, very large 9/11 enterprise that prevented disaster. It was a passenger who saw what he was doing and tackled him. ”We didn’t follow up and prioritize the stream of intelligence,” White House counterterrorism adviser John O. Brennan explained afterward. ”Because no one intelligence entity, or team or task force was assigned responsibility for doing that follow-up investigation.”

Blair acknowledged the problem. His solution: Create yet another team to run down every important lead. But he also told Congress he needed more money and more analysts to prevent another mistake.

More is often the solution proposed by the leaders of the 9/11 enterprise. After the Christmas Day bombing attempt, Leiter also pleaded for more – more analysts to join the 300 or so he already had.”

So you have nearly 900.000 people(nearly 1.5 times as many people as live in Washington, D.C.),who hold top-secret security clearances. And they have access to ALL this data from the mass surveillance.

And at least half of the analyst analyzing this data is fresh out of school, no experience with the countries and the cultures they are analyzing.And of course they don’t speak the language.

And they ALL WANT MORE MONEY AND PERSONAL AND RESOURCES!

Reassuring isn’t it?

If you just read the text above (and below) and didn’t know where this was happening, you would automatically assume this was happening in some brutal totalitarian police state say like North Korea or China.

But it is not, it is happening here in the “democratic” west EVRY SECOND OF YOUR LIFE! FOR THE REST OF YOUR LIFE!

“Under construction by contractors with top-secret clearances, the blandly named Utah Data Center is being built for the National Security Agency. A project of immense secrecy, it is the final piece in a complex puzzle assembled over the past decade. Its purpose: to intercept, decipher, analyze, and store vast swaths of the world’s communications as they zap down from satellites and zip through the underground and undersea cables of international, foreign, and domestic networks. The heavily fortified $2 billion center should be up and running in September 2013. Flowing through its servers and routers and stored in near-bottomless databases will be all forms of communication, including the complete contents of private emails, cell phone calls, and Google searches, as well as all sorts of personal data trails—parking receipts, travel itineraries, bookstore purchases, and other digital “pocket litter.” It is, in some measure, the realization of the “total information awareness” program created during the first term of the Bush administration—an effort that was killed by Congress in 2003 after it caused an outcry over its potential for invading Americans’ privacy.”

“Inside, the facility will consist of four 25,000-square-foot halls filled with servers, complete with raised floor space for cables and storage. In addition, there will be more than 900,000 square feet for technical support and administration. The entire site will be self-sustaining, with fuel tanks large enough to power the backup generators for three days in an emergency, water storage with the capability of pumping 1.7 million gallons of liquid per day, as well as a sewage system and massive air-conditioning system to keep all those servers cool. Electricity will come from the center’s own substation built by Rocky Mountain Power to satisfy the 65-megawatt power demand. Such a mammoth amount of energy comes with a mammoth price tag—about $40 million a year, according to one estimate.”

“In 2011 more than 2 billion of the world’s 6.9 billion people were connected to the Internet. By 2015, market research firm IDC estimates, there will be 2.7 billion users. Thus, the NSA’s need for a 1-million-square-foot data storehouse. Should the agency ever fill the Utah center with a yottabyte of information, it would be equal to about 500 quintillion (500,000,000,000,000,000,000) pages of text.”

“The eavesdropping on Americans doesn’t stop at the telecom switches. To capture satellite communications in and out of the US, the agency also monitors AT&T’s powerful earth stations, satellite receivers in locations that include Roaring Creek and Salt Creek. Tucked away on a back road in rural Catawissa, Pennsylvania, Roaring Creek’s three 105-foot dishes handle much of the country’s communications to and from Europe and the Middle East. And on an isolated stretch of land in remote Arbuckle, California, three similar dishes at the company’s Salt Creek station service the Pacific Rim and Asia.

Binney left the NSA in late 2001, shortly after the agency launched its warrantless-wiretapping program. “They violated the Constitution setting it up,” he says bluntly. “But they didn’t care. They were going to do it anyway, and they were going to crucify anyone who stood in the way. When they started violating the Constitution, I couldn’t stay.” Binney says Stellar Wind was far larger than has been publicly disclosed and included not just eavesdropping on domestic phone calls but the inspection of domestic email. At the outset the program recorded 320 million calls a day, he says, which represented about 73 to 80 percent of the total volume of the agency’s worldwide intercepts. The haul only grew from there. According to Binney—who has maintained close contact with agency employees until a few years ago—the taps in the secret rooms dotting the country are actually powered by highly sophisticated software programs that conduct “deep packet inspection,” examining Internet traffic as it passes through the 10-gigabit-per-second cables at the speed of light.”

The other side of this surveillance state, the ability to use all this equipment, data and personal for cyber-attacks and cyber war efforts.

“In 2003, Alexander, a favorite of defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld, was named the Army’s deputy chief of staff for intelligence, the service’s most senior intelligence position. Among the units under his command were the military intelligence teams involved in the human rights abuses at Baghdad’s Abu Ghraib prison. Two years later, Rumsfeld appointed Alexander—now a three-star general—director of the NSA, where he oversaw the illegal, warrantless wiretapping program while deceiving members of the House Intelligence Committee. In a publicly released letter to Alexander shortly after The New York Times exposed the program, US representative Rush Holt, a member of the committee, angrily took him to task for not being forthcoming about the wiretapping: “Your responses make a mockery of congressional oversight.”

Alexander also proved to be militant about secrecy. In 2005 a senior agency employee named Thomas Drake allegedly gave information to The Baltimore Sun showing that a publicly discussed program known as Trailblazer was millions of dollars over budget, behind schedule, possibly illegal, and a serious threat to privacy. In response, federal prosecutors charged Drake with 10 felony counts, including retaining classified documents and making false statements. He faced up to 35 years in prison—despite the fact that all of the information Drake was alleged to have leaked was not only unclassified and already in the public domain but in fact had been placed there by NSA and Pentagon officials themselves. (As a longtime chronicler of the NSA, I served as a consultant for Drake’s defense team. The investigation went on for four years, after which Drake received no jail time or fine. The judge, Richard D. Bennett, excoriated the prosecutor and NSA officials for dragging their feet. “I find that unconscionable. Unconscionable,” he said during a hearing in 2011. “That’s four years of hell that a citizen goes through. It was not proper. It doesn’t pass the smell test.”)”

“In May, work began on a $3.2 billion facility housed at Fort Meade in Maryland. Known as Site M, the 227-acre complex includes its own 150-megawatt power substation, 14 administrative buildings, 10 parking garages, and chiller and boiler plants. The server building will have 90,000 square feet of raised floor—handy for supercomputers—yet hold only 50 people. Meanwhile, the 531,000-square-foot operations center will house more than 1,300 people. In all, the buildings will have a footprint of 1.8 million square feet. Even more ambitious plans, known as Phase II and III, are on the drawing board. Stretching over the next 16 years, they would quadruple the footprint to 5.8 million square feet, enough for nearly 60 buildings and 40 parking garages, costing $5.2 billion and accommodating 11,000 more cyberwarriors.”

“What’s good for Alexander is good for the fortunes of the cyber-industrial complex, a burgeoning sector made up of many of the same defense contractors who grew rich supplying the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. With those conflicts now mostly in the rearview mirror, they are looking to Alexander as a kind of savior. After all, the US spends about $30 billion annually on cybersecurity goods and services.

In the past few years, the contractors have embarked on their own cyber building binge parallel to the construction boom at Fort Meade: General Dynamics opened a 28,000-square-foot facility near the NSA; SAIC cut the ribbon on its new seven-story Cyber Innovation Center; the giant CSC unveiled its Virtual Cyber Security Center. And at consulting firm Booz Allen Hamilton, whereformer NSA director Mike McConnell was hired to lead the cyber effort, the company announced a “cyber-solutions network” that linked together nine cyber-focused facilities. Not to be outdone, Boeing built a new Cyber Engagement Center. Leaving nothing to chance, it also hired retired Army major general Barbara Fast, an old friend of Alexander’s, to run the operation. (She has since moved on.)”

“One of the most secretive of these contractors is Endgame Systems, a startup backed by VCs including Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, Bessemer Venture Partners, and Paladin Capital Group. Established in Atlanta in 2008, Endgame is transparently antitransparent. “We’ve been very careful not to have a public face on our company,” former vice president John M. Farrell wrote to a business associate in an email that appeared in a WikiLeaks dump. “We don’t ever want to see our name in a press release,” added founder Christopher Rouland. True to form, the company declined Wired’s interview requests.

Perhaps for good reason: According to news reports, Endgame is developing ways to break into Internet-connected devices through chinks in their antivirus armor. Like safecrackers listening to the click of tumblers through a stethoscope, the “vulnerability researchers” use an extensive array of digital tools to search for hidden weaknesses in commonly used programs and systems, such as Windows and Internet Explorer. And since no one else has ever discovered these unseen cracks, the manufacturers have never developed patches for them.

Thus, in the parlance of the trade, these vulnerabilities are known as “zero-day exploits,” because it has been zero days since they have been uncovered and fixed. They are the Achilles’ heel of the security business, says a former senior intelligence official involved with cyberwarfare. Those seeking to break into networks and computers are willing to pay millions of dollars to obtain them.

According to Defense News’ C4ISR Journal and Bloomberg Businessweek, Endgame also offers its intelligence clients—agencies like Cyber Command, the NSA, the CIA, and British intelligence—a unique map showing them exactly where their targets are located. Dubbed Bonesaw, the map displays the geolocation and digital address of basically every device connected to the Internet around the world, providing what’s called network situational awareness.

The client locates a region on the password-protected web-based map, then picks a country and city— say, Beijing, China. Next the client types in the name of the target organization, such as the Ministry of Public Security’s No. 3 Research Institute, which is responsible for computer security—or simply enters its address, 6 Zhengyi Road. The map will then display what software is running on the computers inside the facility, what types of malware some may contain, and a menu of custom-designed exploits that can be used to secretly gain entry. It can also pinpoint those devices infected with malware, such as the Conficker worm, as well as networks turned into botnets and zombies— the equivalent of a back door left open.

Bonesaw also contains targeting data on US allies, and it is soon to be upgraded with a new version codenamed Velocity, according to C4ISR Journal. It will allow Endgame’s clients to observe in real time as hardware and software connected to the Internet around the world is added, removed, or changed. But such access doesn’t come cheap. One leaked report indicated that annual subscriptions could run as high as $2.5 million for 25 zero-day exploits.

The buying and using of such a subscription by nation-states could be seen as an act of war. “If you are engaged in reconnaissance on an adversary’s systems, you are laying the electronic battlefield and preparing to use it,” wrote Mike Jacobs, a former NSA director for information assurance, in a McAfee report on cyberwarfare. “In my opinion, these activities constitute acts of war, or at least a prelude to future acts of war.” The question is, who else is on the secretive company’s client list? Because there is as of yet no oversight or regulation of the cyberweapons trade, companies in the cyber-industrial complex are free to sell to whomever they wish. “It should be illegal,” says the former senior intelligence official involved in cyber­warfare. “I knew about Endgame when I was in intelligence. The intelligence community didn’t like it, but they’re the largest consumer of that business.”

Thus, in their willingness to pay top dollar for more and better zero-day exploits, the spy agencies are helping drive a lucrative, dangerous, and unregulated cyber arms race, one that has developed its own gray and black markets.The companies trading in this arena can sell their wares to the highest bidder—be they frontmen for criminal hacking groups or terrorist organizations or countries that bankroll terrorists, such as Iran.Ironically, having helped create the market in zero-day exploits and then having launched the world into the era of cyberwar, Alexander now says the possibility of zero-day exploits falling into the wrong hands is his “greatest worry.”

Doesn’t that make you feel very safe?

And this is ONLY the US side of things. You have the same picture with more or less the same problems in Europe and the rest of these western countries.

“Britain’s spy agency GCHQ has secretly gained access to the network of cables which carry the world’s phone calls and internet traffic and has started to process vast streams of sensitive personal information which it is sharing with its American partner, the National Security Agency (NSA).

The sheer scale of the agency’s ambition is reflected in the titles of its two principal components: Mastering the Internet and Global Telecoms Exploitation, aimed at scooping up as much online and telephone traffic as possible. This is all being carried out without any form of public acknowledgement or debate.

One key innovation has been GCHQ’s ability to tap into and store huge volumes of data drawn from fibre-optic cables for up to 30 days so that it can be sifted and analysed. That operation, codenamed Tempora, has been running for some 18 months.”

“Each of the cables carries data at a rate of 10 gigabits per second, so the tapped cables had the capacity, in theory, to deliver more than 21 petabytes a day – equivalent to sending all the information in all the books in the British Library 192 times every 24 hours.

And the scale of the programme is constantly increasing as more cables are tapped and GCHQ data storage facilities in the UK and abroad are expanded with the aim of processing terabits (thousands of gigabits) of data at a time.

For the 2 billion users of the world wide web, Tempora represents a window on to their everyday lives, sucking up every form of communication from the fibre-optic cables that ring the world.”

The NSA has meanwhile opened a second window, in the form of the Prism operation, revealed earlier this month by the Guardian, from which it secured access to the internal systems of global companies that service the internet.

The GCHQ mass tapping operation has been built up over five years by attaching intercept probes to transatlantic fibre-optic cables where they land on British shores carrying data to western Europe from telephone exchanges and internet servers in north America.

This was done under secret agreements with commercial companies, described in one document as ”intercept partners”.

Sum total: you have an enormous amount of people involved in this TOTAL MASS SURVELIANCE. ALL with access to OUR whole electronic and internet life.

George Orwell’s famous book 1984 is like a mild kindergarten heaven compared to what IS REALLY GOING ON in western “democracies”.

And last, never forget that nearly ALL the equipment and software used by brutal dictators all over the world to bring death and misery to their people, was sold by US and European companies. Why? Because they are “the best” at it.

Sounds very “reassuring” don’t it?

These companies installed, trained their personal and maintained this equipment helping these brutal dictators accomplish their goals.

“In the truest sense, freedom cannot be bestowed; it must be achieved.”

Franklin D. Roosevelt

”We must plan for freedom, and not only for security, if for no other reason than only freedom can make security more secure.”

“And this is nothing new. We have seen so many different examples of this betrayal of journalist in their role as journalist. In this blog, I have given many examples when it comes to the Global Warming Hysteria.

Where the “journalists” and the mainstream media ACTIVELY choose to become propagandists and his master’s voice. Even worse, they ACTIVELY became attack dogs and tried to suppress and oppress EVERY dissenting voice and protest.

This is the ultimate betrayal of ALL what journalism is supposed to be. And the role they are supposed to play in a “free society”. Goebbels, and Ilya Ehrenburg (his soviet counterpart), would be REALLY PROUD of these men and women!”

“Or this is why the Euro is doomed. And after that EU – Yes we have NO Money.

On Saturday November 17, police officers from all over Spain marched through Madrid, protesting austerity measures and cuts. They even apologized to the public for arresting the wrong people. One of the slogans was:

”Citizens! Forgive us for not arresting those truly responsible for this crisis: bankers and politicians.”

The whole economic and political crisis in EU and USA summarized in one simple sentence.

“The European Union is like a hospital where all the doctors are mad. It doesn’t matter what is wrong, the treatment is always the same – more integration – and it is always wrong. The best thing to do is never to enter it.

Once you are in, the best thing to do is to leave. If you can’t get out, you will probably die.”

I disagree with one thing this author says: “EU is the Stupid Empire”. EU is a POLITICAL project. The Euro is part of that political project.

A lot of EU’s decisions make no economic sense whatsoever. In that regard, Peter Hitchens observation that “EU is the Stupid Empire” is completely right. Not to mention the enormous cost to the common people of all these political motivated but economically disastrous decisions.

The economic side was always a way to “sell it to the people”. Step by step. So that the political agenda could be slowly, but steadily implemented. Until it was too late. The political elites new ALL along that had the EU project been presented to the people for what it really is, people in ALL countries would have rejected it.

BUT EU was on purpose designed this way. So that the people could not stop this political project.

Never forget that ALL the political elites, irrespective of party or ideology, in the EU countries were behind this. With very few exceptions.”

The EU bureaucrats and the political elites always fall back, when they have nothing else to say in defence of the EU, that this is a “peace project”. Well this “peace project” has now created social havoc, riots, and put country against country, and groups of countries against group of countries.

Tearing apart the EU at it’s seems. And ALL of this because they, the political elites, literally AT ALL COST want to preserve the POLITICAL project euro. Which is the cornerstone of the federal super state of Europe.

As I have said before, this has nothing to do with economics; it’s ALL about politics,

And that is why so many people still don’t understand what is going on. Because from an economical point these policies are total madness. Ruining and lowering the living standard of most people. And the political elites know this. But the political project is MORE important.

Then there is Ireland, Italy, Portugal, Cyprus, France….

Just start adding up the GIGANTIC NUMBERS and be utterly horrified!

This is the situation that politicians and the banks have put the common people of Europe in.

They are literally ruining us all. And WE have to pay the price of their folly and speculations.

One more slogan from the protests – They are the same.”

”Everything that is really great and inspiring is created by the individual who can labor in freedom.”

“EU, the politicians and the bankers have shown by their action, and inaction, that they effectively have canceled the social contract with their own citizen.

That unspoken implicit contract between citizens and their rulers that is the backbone of a democratic society.

If you try very, very hard, it is still very difficult to underestimate the seriousness of what happened. This is a game changer. Most people, politicians and “journalist” has still not understood the seriousness and graveness of what happened on a local, national and international level There is so much that was broken ON PURPOSE, including the rule of Law.And the very foundation of the modern financial and banking system.

Which these measures where supposed to protect.

Now anything and everything can and might be done. Whatever boundaries that existed have been breached. There is no Law, no fences and no limits. Pandora’s Box has been opened.

To put it in perspective, this quote from January 18 2008 from Jean-Claude Trichet, the president of the European Central Bank (2003 to 2011):

“For a small, open economy like Cyprus, Euro adoption provides protection from international financial turmoil.”

No comment whatsoever is need. Read it again and ponder the arrogance and irony of it.

And this quote from Luxembourg Prime Minister Jean-Claude Junker. He was alsothe president of the Eurogroup council of euro-zone finance ministers from 2005 to 2013. In that position, he bears primary responsibility for communicating the euro-zone’s financial and economic posture:

“So why the lie?

I was told to say there was no meeting,” said Mr. Schuller (the spokesman for Luxembourg Prime Minister Jean-Claude Juncker), reached by telephone Monday. “We had certain necessities to consider.”

Such as?

Evening in Europe is midday in the United States. “We had Wall Street open at that point in time,” Mr. Schuller said. The euro was falling on the Spiegel report, which had overhyped the meeting. “There was a very good reason to deny that the meeting was taking place.” It was, he said, “self-preservation.”

Asked whether such deliberate misinformation would undermine the market’s confidence in future euro-zone pronouncements, Mr. Schuller, lamenting that the market had practically no confidence in pronouncements already, said “not at all.”

“The Web site EUobserver has video of Mr. Juncker, at a conference on economic governance in April, expounding on the practice and reasons for lying in financial and economic communications.

On the tape, Mr. Juncker says he has “had to lie” and, speaking about touchy economic topics, “When it becomes serious, you have to lie.”

And Jérôme Cahuzac, the Socialist budget minister in France, who had been tasked with battling tax fraud. Who just had to resign because he had an ”undisclosed” Swiss bank account. Minister in charge of battling tax fraud… resigns for having a secret Swiss account. Let that sink in for a bit.

French minister tasked with battling tax fraud accused of having Swiss bank account

French authorities have searched the Paris flat of IMF chief Christine Lagarde as part of an investigation into her handling of a 2008 compensation payment to a businessman supporter of ex-president Nicolas Sarkozy, her lawyer said.

Police are investigating claims that Lagarde, when French Finance Minister under Nicolas Sarkozy, acted illegally in approving the €285m arbitration payout to Bernard Tapie.”

Also, remember that the Cyprus banks went trough the ECB new and “stringent” “stress test” 18 months ago with flying colors.

NO PROBLEM THERE!

These people REALLY know what they are doing don’t you agree?

There you have the setting. Remember, these people decide your fate and can take your money if they want as has been shown in Cyprus.

So let’s start with some of the points and facts:

1. Let’s start by saying that this “crisis” was known at least two years before it “happened”. And EVERYONE that should, know about it. And they DID ABSOLUTELY NOTHING about it.

On the contrary – they even managed to worsen it. Not small feet for our dear politicians and bankers.

The “troika” didn’t want to do anything until after the Italian election. Which didn’t go the way the EU bureaucrats wanted. In addition, since the Cyprus communist president from AKEL didn’t want to do anything to be the one that started “tightening of the belt”, the Troika decided to wait after the Cyprus election on February 17 and 24 this year.

Now the Troikas “man” Nicos Anastasiades was in power. And now the negotiations started.

In the meantime, what was originally a €6 billion bailout in the summer of 2012 was 8 months later a €18 billion bailout. Thanks to EU and IMF doing nothing.

Doing nothing, a favorite political “pastime”,has serious consequences, cost REAL money and effects REAL people in the REAL world.”

”It is incredible how as soon as a people becomes subject, it promptly falls into such complete forgetfulness of its freedom that it can hardly be roused to the point of regaining it, obeying so easily and so willingly that one is led to say … that this people has not so much lost its liberty as won its enslavement.”

Etienne de la Boetie’s The Politics of Obedience:The Discourse of Voluntary Servitude.

EU, the politicians and the bankers have shown by their action, and inaction, that they effectively have canceled the social contract with their own citizen.

That unspoken implicit contract between citizens and their rulers that is the backbone of a democratic society.

I had planed to write about the recent developments in Cyprus, but now I have so much material that it is ridicules. Every day there are new revelations about what went on behind the scene. And are STILL going on!

So I decided to just do a very short version (well, sort of) – Cyprus for dummies so to speak. With some of the more important facts and points among many, many.

If you try very, very hard, it is still very difficult to underestimate the seriousness of what happened. This is a game changer. Most people, politicians and “journalist” has still not understood the seriousness and graveness of what happened on a local, national and international level There is so much that was broken ON PURPOSE, including the rule of Law.And the very foundation of the modern financial and banking system.

Which these measures where supposed to protect.

Now anything and everything can and might be done. Whatever boundaries that existed have been breached. There is no Law, no fences and no limits. Pandora’s Box has been opened.

To put it in perspective, this quote from January 18 2008 from Jean-Claude Trichet, the president of the European Central Bank (2003 to 2011):

“For a small, open economy like Cyprus, Euro adoption provides protection from international financial turmoil.”

No comment whatsoever is need. Read it again and ponder the arrogance and irony of it.

And this quote from Luxembourg Prime Minister Jean-Claude Junker. He was alsothe president of the Eurogroup council of euro-zone finance ministers from 2005 to 2013. In that position, he bears primary responsibility for communicating the euro-zone’s financial and economic posture:

“So why the lie?

I was told to say there was no meeting,” said Mr. Schuller (the spokesman for Luxembourg Prime Minister Jean-Claude Juncker), reached by telephone Monday. “We had certain necessities to consider.”

Such as?

Evening in Europe is midday in the United States. “We had Wall Street open at that point in time,” Mr. Schuller said. The euro was falling on the Spiegel report, which had overhyped the meeting. “There was a very good reason to deny that the meeting was taking place.” It was, he said, “self-preservation.”

Asked whether such deliberate misinformation would undermine the market’s confidence in future euro-zone pronouncements, Mr. Schuller, lamenting that the market had practically no confidence in pronouncements already, said “not at all.”

“The Web site EUobserver has video of Mr. Juncker, at a conference on economic governance in April, expounding on the practice and reasons for lying in financial and economic communications.

On the tape, Mr. Juncker says he has “had to lie” and, speaking about touchy economic topics, “When it becomes serious, you have to lie.”

And of course, you have his successor Dutch Finance MinisterJeroen Dijsselbloem, the new president of the Eurogroup council of euro-zone finance ministers. He was talking about the “new template” for further bailouts after Cyprus. Only to retract most of these new rules a couple of hours later – so he didn’t say what he actually said on a recorded interview.

And Jérôme Cahuzac, the Socialist budget minister in France, who had been tasked with battling tax fraud. Who just had to resign because he had an ”undisclosed” Swiss bank account. Minister in charge of battling tax fraud… resigns for having a secret Swiss account. Let that sink in for a bit.

French minister tasked with battling tax fraud accused of having Swiss bank account

French authorities have searched the Paris flat of IMF chief Christine Lagarde as part of an investigation into her handling of a 2008 compensation payment to a businessman supporter of ex-president Nicolas Sarkozy, her lawyer said.

Police are investigating claims that Lagarde, when French Finance Minister under Nicolas Sarkozy, acted illegally in approving the €285m arbitration payout to Bernard Tapie.”

Also, remember that the Cyprus banks went trough the ECB new and “stringent” “stress test” 18 months ago with flying colors.

NO PROBLEM THERE!

These people REALLY know what they are doing don’t you agree?

There you have the setting. Remember, these people decide your fate and can take your money if they want as has been shown in Cyprus.

So let’s start with some of the points and facts:

1. Let’s start by saying that this “crisis” was known at least two years before it “happened”. And EVERYONE that should, know about it. And they DID ABSOLUTELY NOTHING about it.

On the contrary – they even managed to worsen it. Not small feet for our dear politicians and bankers.

The “troika” didn’t want to do anything until after the Italian election. Which didn’t go the way the EU bureaucrats wanted. In addition, since the Cyprus communist president from AKEL didn’t want to do anything to be the one that started “tightening of the belt”, the Troika decided to wait after the Cyprus election on February 17 and 24 this year.

Now the Troikas “man” Nicos Anastasiades was in power. And now the negotiations started.

In the meantime, what was originally a €6 billion bailout in the summer of 2012 was 8 months later a €18 billion bailout. Thanks to EU and IMF doing nothing.

Doing nothing, a favorite political “pastime”,has serious consequences, cost REAL money and effects REAL people in the REAL world.

2. An interesting fact, which have not been very much noted, is that the Troika from the beginning DID NOT demand a “tax” (confiscation) on deposits from €100 000 and under. It was only on deposits over €100 000 “The Russian money” that was uninsured.

But ”their man” Anastasiades refused. He didn’t want to anger Russia to much. It was only after this that EVERY deposit was “taxed” (confiscated). It is interesting isn’t it that the president of Cyprus rather that anger Russia, willingly confiscated the money from the poor, the common people and small businesses in his own country.

Remember also that of all the 371,000 deposits in the Cyprus banks 361,000 of them was below €100 000. And supposed to be “insured”.

Yeah, we know what that means now!

Just one example of many from retired 65-year-old John Demitriou:

“So much has been written of the Cypriot bail-ins and massive haircuts for the uninsured depositors – assumed to be nasty oligarchic Russian money-launderers – that, it appears, the reality for people living in Cyprus has been forgotten. We noted earlier the small business issues, but as the Sydney Morning Herald reports, real lives have been destroyed. 65-year-old John Demitriou retired (back) to the picturesque fishing village of Liopetri, Cyprus, with his life-savings of around $1 million living off the interest it paid from Laiki ‘Popular’ Bank

He planned to spend it on his grandchildren – some of whom live in Cyprus – putting them through university and setting them up. There would be medical bills; he has a heart condition. The interest was paying for a comfortable retirement, and trips back to Australia. He also toyed with the idea of buying a boat.

He wanted to leave any big purchases a few years, to be sure this was where he would spend his retirement. There was no hurry. But now it is all gone.

”If I made the decision to stay, I was going to build a house,” John says. ”Unfortunately I didn’t make the decision yet.

”I went to sleep Friday as a rich man. I woke up a poor man.”

His money was all in the Laiki ”Popular” Bank which was the main casualty of Cyprus’ bailout package set by the European Union. Laiki is to be dismantled. Savings of less than €100,000 are to move to the Bank of Cyprus. Anything more than that will almost certainly be wiped out as the bank is wound down, its remaining assets taken by the bank’s creditors.

Last week he heard a rumour that the bank was in trouble and went into Aiya Napa to ask his bank manager – a friend – if he should move his life savings.

”There’s no problem, nothing to worry about,” he was told.

Not so. ”I go to bed and I can’t sleep. I walk around, I have a coffee. I am thinking about my family.”

John’s tears flow. As he chokes up, his son George, who moved to Cyprus in 1990, explains.

”The whole family, we used to work at the markets. I would work at the markets on the weekend to help my parents while my mates were off having fun. Honest work in honest jobs. Now all that hard work is paying the debts of other people and the government. It’s disgusting, to be honest.

”For the moment I am ‘sitting on charcoal’, as they say,” waiting to see if he gets burnt.

Memo from the Central Bank of Cyprus sent to bank CEOs on February 11, to put them at ease.

3. And the Troika in their eagerness agreed to this. Thereby destroyingthe very foundation of the modern financial and banking system. Including the “protection” for deposits under € 100 000 in EU. Which was the backbone to restore “confidence” in the banks after ALL their mismanagement, speculations and crisis.

No Deposits – No Banks. It’s very simple really.

You see nearly ALL the money they use to “invest” or speculate is yours, the depositors. And because the high leverage they have used on this money, they are in trouble. And they know it.

So if you start taking out your money the whole deck of card will collapse.

Why should you keep YOUR money in the banks after this? When you know that at a moments notice (on a weekend so you can do nothing), the politicians can decide that you should “help” finance this or that for “the common good”. Which of course they decide.

No to mention that you don’t get any rent to speak off on you money in the banks. And on that miniscule rent, you have to pay taxes. And you lose eve more when you consider the REAL inflation in each country.

Our “dear” politicians have now for a long time in their actions, taxes, laws etc; favored loans and debt, and punished saving. Sounds like a ”healthy” strategy for the long time doesn’t it?

Some countries, like USA, use this strategy to drive down the value of the currency and thereby their cost of the national debt.

4. During the time when the banks where closed (11 days), and the accounts “frozen” and the common people could only take out a daily limited amount trough the ATM machines.

At the same time, you get so impressed by this people and their total lack of knowledge and understanding of what they decide, the Cyprus banks filial in London and Moscow (Uniastrum Bank) where open with NO RESTRICTIONS AT ALL.

And every one from five years and upwards can guess what happened next except the Troika and the EU politicians.

Most of the money from the big accounts where transferred or withdrawn. Including from a lot of Cyprus politicians, including the presidents family.

So the very money that was the target and the bulk of the €5.8 billion that Cyprus was to “put up”, the Russian money, was allowed to “escape”.

As a consequence the Cyprus Centeral Bank would need a big increase in emergency funding from the ECB in the form of ELA to make up for the deposit outflows. Which is precisely what happened.

These are the politicians that “tax” (confiscate) YOUR money in the banks.

The people in the know already started the outflow from Cyprus in January.

As a result, they have to take a MUCH BIGGER percentage of these big accounts left, mostly local businesses.

You can see one example here, This IT company had €849.682 on it’s company account. They confiscated €720.898.

That’s 85% of the company’s account!

This company has consequently gone bankrupt and has fired all the Cypriots that worked there.

That’s REALLY going to be helpful for the local economy don’t you think?

Another effect that has started to emerge this week is that international companies, customers, clients etc, have told local Cyprus companies that they will no longer sign contracts with a Cypriot company. Overnight, the jurisdiction is a pariah.

This will of course do even “more wonders” for the local economy and “help” them recover.

Then there is the spreading of the economic downturn effect because of these measures, which are now hitting Greece. Greece has already had three bailouts and still the economic situation is getting worse. And now this.

“At least 1,600 Greek businesses – from shipping, retail to tourism – will suffer from the Cyprus bailout deal announced on Sunday after a showdown between Brussels and Nicosia, according to Vasilis Korkidis, head of the National Confederation of Greek Commerce (ESEE).

“The tragic situation in Cyprus will certainly have immediate effects on the Greek market, since a large part of the domestic businesses maintain close ties with Cypriot companies,” Korkidis said in a statement on Tuesday. He was particularly critical of the capital controls and the impending haircut on large deposits (over 100,000 euros) expected to be more than 40%.

Greece’s exports to Cyprus exceed 1bn euros annually and the country is Cyprus’ biggest trade partner, followed by the United Kingdom and Germany. “

And of course there is the Capital Controls that are now imposed since the banks opened.

With “a little help” from EU and IMF you can really be ruined wouldn’t you say?

You can take this example of this company and the example of pensioner John Demitriou above whose life savings were confiscated. And remember, he went to the bank just two days before they closed and confiscated his money, and asked his bank manager – a friend – if he should move his life savings.

”There’s no problem, nothing to worry about,” he was told.

Contrast that with the people in the know, such as the newly elected President Nicos Anastasiades’, and their actions:

“A company owned by in-laws of Cypriot President Nicos Anastasiades withdrew dozens of millions from Laiki Bank on March 12 and 13, according to an article published in Cypriot newspaper Haravgi.

The newspaper, which is affiliated to the communist-rooted AKEL party, reports that three days before the Eurogroup meeting the company took five promissory notes worth €21m from Laiki Bank and transferred the money to London. “

And there is now a list of 132 companies and individuals has emerged who withdrew their €-denominated deposits in the two weeks from March 1 to March 15, (see below)

“These 132 companies and individuals have withdrawn all deposits in euros, dollars and rubles, which were transferred to other banks outside Cyprus.”

It is a VERY; VERY; VERY; VERY long time since politicians took the motto “to serve and protect” it’s people seriously.

On a side note, to show the difference between people and the“political elites”:

Here in Sweden because of money laundering laws, you have to register and give full personal details when you buy a buss or subway ticket by your mobile phone. We are talking about $3-4 /ticket.

And in the examples above, we are talkingabout billions of euros. WHEN THE BANKS WERE CLOSED AND SUPPOSEDLY MONITORED.

It cannot be more pedagogic and clearer that this. One rule and monitoring/surveillance for the common people and their $3-4 tickets. Another for the political class/elites were billions of euros are allowed to escape from closed and supervised banks.

And remember, we are paying them! And they are the ones that put the money laundering laws in place and enforce them on us.

5. A key goal throughout these negotiations has been to make Cypriot debt “sustainable”. The effect of the Troikas measures is more than likely to collapse the GDP in Cyprus. The €10bn bailout was supposed to push Cypriot debt down to 140% of GDP. If Cypriot GDP falls by just a couple of percentage this year (which is now guarantied), that percentage rises drastically. So we are back where we started.

With Cyprus needing even more and bigger “bailouts”.

Or how EU shot itself in the head, arms, stomach and both legs at the same time. Congratulating itself ate the same time for this “great achievement”.

6.And then there is all that cronyism, corruption and political favors that was going on in Cyprus banks. Just a few examples were money was given, loans “written off” etc:

“A list of Cypriot companies and politicians that allegedly had millions of euros in loans written off by the three Cypriot lenders at a center of an unprecedented banking crisis on the Mediterranean island has been forward to Cyprus’s parliamentary ethics committee after its publication in Greece’s daily Ethnos newspaper.

According to the revelations, Bank of Cyprus, Hellenic Bank(Laiki) and Hellenic Bank — which were earlier this week acquired by Greece’s Piraeus Bank — has forgiven companies, MPs and local authority officials millions of euros in loans over the past five years.

The list reportedly features the names of politicians from all Cypriot parties except Social Democracy (EDEK) and the Social Ecology Movement (KKO).”

“According to Ethnos, Bank of Cyprus wrote off the 2.8-million-euro loan of a hotel with ties to the communist-rooted Progressive Party (AKEL)and forgave significant portions of many other loans. For instance a national labor union is said to have been forgiven 193,000 euros of a 554,000-euro loan. An unnamed company was forgiven 110,000 euros from a 1.83-million-euro loan, a prominent deputy of the centrist Democratic Rally (DISY) party saw 101,000 euros of a 168,000-euro loan written off and a company owned by the brother of a former minister of the conservative Democratic Party (DIKO)had 1.28 million euros of a 1.59-million-euro loan written off.

The list refers to several other MPs and the mayor of large city who allegedly had significant portions of their loans forgiven by Bank of Cyprus. Companies linked to a member of the bank’s board, to the daughter-in-law of a DIKO deputy and several others also appear to have been offered significant loan relief by the Bank of Cyprus.

As for Laiki Bank, it is said to have written off several loans taken out by MPs of AKEL and DISY. The bank also appears to have written off 5.8 million US dollars in debt from a company whose majority shareholder is said to be a well-known Cypriot politician. The ex wife of a senior ministry official and a company owned by a local ambassador also appear to have been facilitated.”

“THE government yesterday reaffirmed its intention to fully investigate the banking sector, as a list surfaced with names of current and former state officials who allegedly had their loans written off by banks.

The list, published in Greece, contains the names of former and current MPs as well as other prominent individuals, including former president George Vassiliou.

According to the report, Vassiliou held a 51 per cent stake in a company that agreed to have $5.8 million written off.

The government said the matter would be investigated as part of a wider probe into what caused the collapse of the island’s economy and banking system.”

Yeah sure!

“ What the common theme here is that the very same Members of Parliament who were so vocal in rejecting the insured depositors’ impairment just to save their skins from a public mutiny (but so quick to sacrifice the wealthier citizens and small and medium corporations to a haircut that may be as deposit large as 100%), did everything in their power to avoid a vote on the final bank ”resolution” which effectively handed over the country’s sovereignty into the hands of the Troika and its liquidators, but not before they themselves were among the key beneficiaries of the impairments on the banking system’s asset side.

It is these bad assets and impaired losses, as well as investing money in Greek bonds, and other worthless ”assets”, that ultimately ended up forcing the restructuring of the bank and the cram up of the liability side up to and including the unsecured loans known as deposits.

Perhaps if the Cypriot public wants to find a scapegoat to its troubles, it should focus its anger not only at the Russian Oligarchs and the Troika, but to those who were most complicit in betraying the public’s trust: the same politicians who were elected to protect their citizens and the country’s constitution (flagrantly abused as per yesterday’s revelations), including the very president of the nation. That is, of course, if the local apathetic population has not been zombified too much to even care about why billions in wealth was just confiscated from it. Because if that is indeed the case, they, and everyone else who just sits idly by and does nothing as the global banking syndicate appropriates ever more middle-class wealth, deserves everything coming their way.”

Yiannakis Omirou, Cypriot House of Representatives President, who just last week, was calling for the nation to accept it is ”time for responsibility” as they progressed towards a final solution.

Now he is singing another tune :

“There is no other alternative but to free Cyprus from the bonds of the troika and the memorandum, House of Representatives President Yiannakis Omirou has said.

Omirou also expressed his conviction that no Attorney General would dream of not following through with the results of an investigation led by an independent committee to apportion blame on those responsible for bringing the country’s economy and banking sector near collapse.

Omirou talked about the troika demands, which according to him will multiply and will turn Cyprus to a colony of the worst possible type and warned “I would like to send a message to the Cyprus people that there is no other way, there is no alternative apart from freeing (the country) from the troika’s and the memorandum’s bonds”.

He noted that certainly, “this road will demand sacrifices”, adding that “by leaving the troika and the EMS behind us, we will ensure our national independence, our national sovereignty, our moral integrity and our economic independence”.

“If we remain bound by the Troika and the memorandum Cyprus’ destiny is already foretold and there will be no future”, he pointed out.”

Cyprus – Omirou: “If we remain bound by the Troika there will be no future”

7. When Greek bonds were the most toxic investment avalibale, the Cyprus bank was bying them like mad. One of them was Laiki Bank’s chief risk officer Dimitris Spanodimos. Thanks to huge deposits from Russia this left them with, in Spanodimos’ words, ”comfortable liquidity and capital position to deepen selectively some highly profitable and highly promising client relationships.” In short, they had so much cash that they had to invest it somewhere.

Mr. Spanodimos boasted on an Aug. 31, 2010, conference call with analysts that the bank was expanding faster than rivals in Greece and bulking up on residential mortgages. ”We have used our group’s comfortable liquidity and capital position to deepen selectively some highly profitable and highly promising client relationships,” he said.

His bank, Cyprus Popular Bank PCL, is now ruined. Its destruction—and the near-failure of its larger peer, Bank of Cyprus PCL—was the result of poor choices by bank managers and of a European regulatory system that gave both banks a clean bill of health as their infections festered.“

“An examination of regulatory documents, conference-call transcripts and financial filings shows that both banks gorged on Greece while nearly everyone else was purging.

In late 2010, even after German and French leaders had openly agreed that creditors of fiscally weak governments should take losses on future bailouts, the two Cypriot banks appeared nonchalant about their exposure to Greek government bonds.

By the end of the year, according to European regulators, the two banks had a combined €5.8 billion ($7.5 billion) of Greek government bonds—€1 billion more than they had held just nine months earlier, and a sum equivalent to about one-third of Cyprus’s annual economic output. By comparison, over the same period, Barclays cut its Greek government exposure by more than half.

Both Cypriot banks passed Europe-wide stress tests in 2010, relieving them of pressure to change course. They passed again in 2011.

”Their regulator was clearly signaling it was OK to go on” expanding in Greece, said Christine Johnson, a bond-fund manager at Old Mutual Global Investors in London, referring to Cyprus’s central bank and European banking regulators.

Cyprus Popular and Bank of Cyprus have booked combined losses of €4.3 billion on their Greek government-bond holdings.”

In July 2010, a pan-EU regulator conducted ”stress tests” of banks to gauge how they would fare if economic conditions worsened. Crucially, the tests modeled the impact of the economy on loan portfolios but didn’t contemplate the possibility that government bonds could produce losses.

Cyprus’s two main banks passed easily, with a total of €572 million of surplus capital.The Central Bank of Cyprus declared ”deep satisfaction” with the results, which it said ”demonstrate the ability of the domestic banking sector to withstand shocks under adverse scenarios.”

“In 2011, the European Banking Authority ordered more stress tests. Like the ones the previous year, they didn’t contemplate losses on government bonds. The two Cypriot banks were again found to have plenty of capital to withstand a deteriorating economic environment.

Less than a week after the results came out, European leaders reached a deal for a new Greek bailout that included losses on Greek bonds. That plan was never executed—another plan,which saw steeper losses, eventually was—but now the specter of such losses was out in the open.”

On Dec. 8, 2011, the EBA tried for the third time to come to grips with the capital deficits at major European banks. This time, the authority factored in possible government-bond losses and concluded that Bank of Cyprus and Cyprus Popular were among 31 banks that needed to come up with new capital.

Bank of Cyprus‘s estimated deficit was €1.56 billion and Cyprus Popular’s was €1.97 billion. The banks had until June 2012 to come up with the new capital.

8. The lies and delusions – when Cyprus’ Massive Deposits Were A Great Thing. As recently as 10 months ago, as this May 2012 presentation from the Bank of Cyprus titled ”International Banking Services: Strategic Business Crossroad – A Reliable Financial Center”.

Some quotes ”Size and structure of the Cyprus financial system reflects Cyprus’ role as an international business centre” and that ”This is reflected in the growing number of companies registered in Cyprus and the increasing size of the banking system” as measured by the record amount of banking deposits.

No comment needed.

Page 11 highlighting the strength of the banking sector in Cyprus here:

9. With the bailout also comes a “straightjacket” of orders, rules and regulations from the Troika for the Cyprus government to implement.

This is what happens when you have irresponsible politicians, irresponsible bankers that speculate and when you are a member of the Eurozone. It is not just all the taxes (confiscation) of deposits, it is also the Memorandum of Understanding from the Troika which dictates terms for the Cyprus government revenue increases and spending cuts as a prerecusite for the “loan”.

Below is a leaked draft of the revised Cypriot MOU being prepared by the head of the IMF mission to the island nation, Delia Velculescu.

This is very detailed. And I put it here so people can begin to understand the depth and width of these regulations. It goes to the heart of most peoples lifes.

This is what heppens when you are indebted over your ears and can not pay. Andremember, these same politicans behind this MOU are the same politicans that are putting us all into more debt every year. Which our grandchildren still have to be paying.

•Increase the statutory retirement age by 2 years for the various categories of employees

•Reduce preferential treatment of specific groups of employees, like members of the army and police force, in the occupational pension plans, in particular concerning the contribution to the lump-sum benefits;

•Reduce certain benefits and privileges for state officials and senior government officials, in particular by suspending the right to travel first/business class by state officials, senior government officials and employees with the exception of transatlantic travel.

•Introduce a permanent contribution of 3% on pensionable earnings to Widows and Orphans Fund by state officials who are entitled to a pension and gratuity. Introduce a contribution of 6.8% on pensionable earnings by officials, who are entitled to a pension and gratuity but are not covered by the government’s pension scheme or any other similar plan;

•Actuarially reducing pension entitlements from the General Social Insurance Scheme by 0.5% per month for retirements earlier than the statutory retirement age at the latest from January 2013, in line with the planned increase in the minimum age for entitlement to an unreduced pension to reach 65 (by 6 months per year), between 2013 and 2016;

•Ensure a reduction of seasonal hourly paid employees by 992 from 1806 in 2012 to 814.

•Implement a four-year plan as prepared by the Public Administration and Personnel Department aimed at the abolition of at least 1880 permanent posts over the period 2013-2016.

•Ensure additional revenues from property taxation of at least 70 million by updating the 1980 prices through application of the CPI index for the period 1980 to 2012

•Increase the statutory corporate income tax rate to 12.5%; Increase the tax rate on interest and dividend income to 30%.

•Increase the bank levy on deposits raised by banks and credit institutions in Cyprus from 0.11% to 0.15% with 25/60 of the revenue earmarked for a special account for a Financial Stability Fund

•Undertake a reform of the tax system for motor vehicles, based on environmentally-friendly principles, with a view to raising additional revenues, through the annual road tax, the registration fee and excise duties, including motor fuel duties.

•Ensure a reduction in total outlays for social transfers by at least EUR 113 million through: (a) the abolition of a number of redundant and overlapping schemes such as the mothers allowance, other family allowances and educational allowances; and (b) the abolition of supplementary allowances under public assistance, the abolition of the special grant and the streamlining of the Easter allowance for pensioners.

•Ensure a reduction of at least EUR 29 million in the total outlays of allowances for employees in the public and broader public sector by i) taxing pensionable allowances provided to senior government officials and employees (secretarial services, representation, and hospitality allowances) in the public and broader public sector ii) reducing the allowances provided to broader public sector employees and reducing all other allowances of broader public sector employees, government officials and hourly paid employees by 15%; and iii) reducing the daily overseas subsistence allowance for business trips by 15%. Ensure a further reduction the subsistence allowance of the current allowance when lunch/dinner is offered by 50% (20% – 45% of overseas subsistence allowance instead of 40% – 90% currently paid).

•Increase excise duties on beer by 25% from EUR 4.78 per hl to EUR 6.00 per hl per degree of pure alcohol of final product. Increase excise duties on ethyl alcohol from EUR 598.01 to EUR 956.82 per hl of pure alcohol.

OK, I stop here. It’s already way to long. But it is important that you get a true picture of what is happening and why.

As I said in the beginning, there a lots of other points to be made but then this post would have been 90+ pages more. And that is for another day.

So the German people/taxpayers who so far have paid most of the bailouts of the bankrupt euro states (Greece, Spain. Portugal, Ireland etc), and were the bankrupt states insists on Germany paying EVEN more to “save the euro” (together with Sweden, Finland etc), don’t even have HALF THE NET WEALTH of the peoples they are bailing out!

No wonder that the German Bundesbank is keeping this report secret. Because I don’t think the people in Germany is going to be “very happy” when they discover the truth.

They have keep their economy in reasonably good shape and paid their taxes. Now they have to pay for the ones who didn’t.

And there is a newGermany Anti-Euro Party with some very prominent figures behind it. Its founders are a collection of some of the country’s top economists and academics, business people, journalist etc.

And by then way, this would never ever happen in Sweden. Because here, these same people, are the ones that have relentlessly driven (together with our “dear” politicians), the integration with EU and moving most of the power to Brussels. What a contrast.

In December 2006, the ECB established the HFSC network of survey specialists, statisticians, and economists from its own ranks, national central banks of the Eurozone, and statistical institutes. The acronym stood for Household Finance and Consumption Survey. It would collect “micro-level structural information” on household wealth. A massive bureaucratic undertaking. Surveys went out in 2010. Results are now ready. No one in Europe had ever done a survey on that scale before. And no one might ever do it again. Because, in the era of bailouts and wealth-transfers, the results are so explosive that the Bundesbank is keeping its report secret—and word has leaked out why.

The surveys were conducted on a national basis, with each central bank publishing its own report. They would then be combined and summarized by the ECB into a cohesive picture of how wealthy—or how poor—people in various parts of the Eurozone were. A number of countries already published their reports, including Italy and Austria.

What the Austrian National Bank found was not pretty (20-page PDF). The considerable wealth in Austria was very unevenly distributed. The wealthiest 5% owned nearly half of the country’s wealth. Their median wealth was €1.7 million in diversified assets. The lower 50% owned only 4% of the country’s wealth. Of them, 83% rented their homes. Their median wealth was a measly €11,000 consisting usually of a car and a savings account. That’s half of the people!And 10% had a net wealth of less than €1,000.

This unequal distribution of wealth created a huge gap between median income (half the people earned more, the other half less) of €76,000 and average income of €265,000 (pushed up by a small number of extremely wealthy households). And that’s why some countries don’t even publish average income values. Too much truth would hurt.

Germany’s data is likely to be similar—but the Bundesbank is treating its report like a secret. Because the results are, let’s say, awkward for two reasons.The highly unequal distribution of wealth is one of them. The German government already went through wild gyrations late last year, and now again, over its Poverty Report that exposed some inconvenient facts that were then edited out—something that was leaked immediately, and it caused a ruckus [read…. Censored: Poverty Report in Germany].

Italy is the other issue. But it may be too hot for the Bundesbank to touch. Italy’s report (142-page PDF) finds that median household net wealth has increased 56% since 1991. And from 2008 to 2010, it increased by about 5% annually, despite the crisis!

But the wealth of German households stagnated during much of that time while they paid taxes out of their noses. And now they might learn that Italy’s median household wealth is €163,875—while Germany’s is closer to Austria’s, around €76,000. Less than half!

“Politically explosive,” sources at the Bundesbank whispered to the FAZ.

These reports show that in some countries, like Italy, where government finances have been in crisis, median household wealth is actually greater than in some financially healthy countries where governments have kept deficits and debts down.

Germany’s federal government only had a minuscule deficit in 2012. But high taxes and the citizens’ greater willingness to pay them—though cheating is a national sport—have over the years extracted a lot of wealth from the people and transferred it to the government. In Italy, people have been more adept at hanging on to their wealth. To the detriment of government finances. Other studies have shown similar trends, but never on such a scale with such detail, and in this “harmonized” and easily comparable manner.

It could stir up a firestorm in Germany. It’s not just jealousy. Strung-out German taxpayers would have to be bamboozled into bailing out the mountain of Italian government debt that the Italians, whose median wealth is twice that of Germans, refused to pay for. It won’t sit well. Not at all. It could become a political nightmare for Chancellor Angela Merkel, who faces an election in a few months and must keep any kind of tumult out of the scenery.

If the report ever sees the light of the day in unvarnished form—not a certainty given the debacle of the Poverty Report—Bundesbank statisticians will be trying to explain away the difference between countries like Italy and Germany. Household wealth is particularly high in countries with high homeownership rates, they will argue. In countries where renting is popular, like Germany, a considerable part of the housing stock is owned by the government and rented out in a subsidized manner. Thus the wealth is public, etc. etc. Because the bailout saga must go on. The messy reality that Germans can’t afford to bail out their richer neighbors must not be allowed to interfere with the grand and glorious saga of the euro.

Every country in the Eurozone has its own collection of big fat lies that politicians and eurocrats have served up in order to make the euro and the subsequent bailouts or austerity measures less unappetizing. Here are some from the German point of view….. Ten Big Fat Lies To Keep The Euro Dream Alive.”

“On September 17, the German Labor Ministry sent a draft report “on Poverty and Wealth” to the other ministries to be rubber-stamped. Only the final report, once sanctified by Chancellor Angela Merkel, would be made public. The draft was supposed to remain hidden. But it seeped to the surface almost immediately. And it was hot. Too hot.

The massive data (PDF, 535 pages) described the tough reality that many people faced in Germany—a reality that got tougher every year. For example, in 1998, the lower 50% of the population owned 4% of all private wealth, while the upper 10% owned 45%. By 2008, the lower 50% owned only 1%, but the upper 10% had increased its share to 53% (at the expense also of the in-between 40%). Other reports have painted similar pictures.

The poverty report by Germany’s statistical agency showed that the “poverty rate” in Germany has been creeping up: in 2008, it was 15.5%; in 2009 it was 15.6%, and in 2010 it was 15.8%. Particularly hard-hit were people under 65 who lived alone. Their poverty rate was 36.1%. For single-parent households, it was 37.1%. The city of Munich issued its own poverty report. By taking into account Munich’s high cost of living, it found that nearly a fifth of its residents lived in poverty.”

“A new party is forming this spring, intent on abandoning European efforts to prop up the common currency. And its founders are a collection of some of the country’s top economists and academics.”

Named Alternative für Deutschland (Alternative for Germany), the group has a clear goal: ”the dissolution of the euro in favor of national currencies or smaller currency unions.” The party also demands an end to aid payments and the dismantling of the European Stability Mechanism bailout fund.

”Democracy is eroding,” reads a statement on its website (German only). ”The will of the people regarding (decisions relating to the euro) is never queried and is not represented in parliament. The government is depriving voters of a voice through disinformation, is pressuring constitutional organs, like parliament and the Constitutional Court, and is making far-reaching decisions in committees that have no democratic legitimacy.”

Prominent Supporters

Alternative for Germany appears to be different, though it has yet to produce a party manifesto. Its impressive list of prominent supporters includes a large number of conservative and economically liberal university professors. The most notable name on the list is Hans-Olaf Henkel, the former president of the Federation of German Industries, but it also includes such economists as Joachim Starbatty and Wilhelm Hankel, who were part of the group that challenged Greek bailout aid at Germany’s Constitutional Court.

Main initiator Bernd Lucke, a professor of macro-economics from Hamburg, was a member of Chancellor Angela Merkel’s Christian Democrats for 33 years before leaving the party in 2011 as a result of euro bailout efforts. ”The current, so-called rescue policies are exclusively focused on short-term interests, primarily those of the banks,” Lucke told the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung this week.”

EU, and the political elites behind it, is no longer a caricature or a joke. They have managed to become a joke of a caricature. An absurd Alice in Wonderland economic and political farce is playing out and the common people of Europe is, as usual, paying the price.

Here is just some updated data to some of my previous posts. It ain’t pretty to say the least!

The EU Crisis is anything but over regardless of what the political elites are trying to tell people in Europe. The ECB may have pushed the banking crisis temporarily back by promising unlimited bond buying. Yes, dear people, read that again – UNLIMITED!

That’s your tax money spent like a drunken sailor.

But soon there is NO MONEY LEFT.

So here we go again for the 7th, 8th or is it the 9th time so far – Europe’s banking system is breaking down again. No surprise to anybody expect or politicians and bankers.

Just start adding up the GIGANTIC NUMBERS and be utterly horrified!

This is the situation that politicians and the banks have put the common people of Europe in.

They are literally ruining us all. And WE, the common people, have to pay the price of their folly and speculations.

“How can broke economies lend money to other broke economies who haven’t got any moneybecause they can’t pay back the money the broke economy lent to the other broke economy and shouldn’t have lent them in the first place because the broke economy cant pay it back”.

Even a 5 year old can understand this. But not “our” politicians and bankers.

Remember that the Euro was always a political project. That’s why “they” haven’t done the”proper” economic policies. Because these policies would undermine the political purpose of the Euro. So they, the political elites of EU, are trapped. And that’s why the Euro was domed from the beginning.

And of course, none of this is covered in the mainstream/old media or by our “dear” politicians.

“Greece’s four largest banks need to boost their capital by 27.5 billion euros ($36.3 billion) after taking losses from the country’s debt swap earlier this year, the largest sovereign restructuring in history.

To put this in perspective: The entire capital base of the Greek banking system is only €22 billion.

By saying that Greek banks need €27.5 billionGreece is essentially admitting that is needs to recapitalize its entire banking system. Also, you should know that Greek banks are still sitting on €46.8 billion in bad loans.

So the Greek banks have a capital base of €22 billion and bad loans of €46.8 billion.

There is a name for this – Bankrupt!

And remember, this is AFTER ALL the “rescue plans”, bailouts etc. already implemented so far by the “Troika” (IMF, ECB and EC).

Cyprus

Cyprus is the euro area’s third-smallest economy in GDP terms, accounting for less than 0.2% of the region’s output. Yet the country urgently needs external funding and applied for an Troika (EC/IMF/ECB) programme last summer. In the meantime, the amount in question has risen to EUR 17.5bn (100% of GDP).

Read that again – 100% of GDP!

By mid-2012, larger banks like Bank of Cyprus or Cyprus Popular Bank alone reported loans to Greek borrowers that exceeded Cyprus’ GDP.

The Cyprus central bank’s emergency liquidity assistance (ELA) to the banking system skyrocketed from EUR150m in March 2012 to EUR 9.9bn (55% of GDP) in September.

So the Cyprus central bank only in September but in 55% of the whole Cyprus GDP into its own banking sector.

“Bankia’s shareholders have received a nasty new year’s surprise. They may lose most of their investments or even all of them says the Spanish bank rescue fund in its latest report.

According to FROB, the Fund for Orderly Bank Restructuring, Bankia has a negative value of 4.2 billion euros, and its parent group BFA is 10.4 bn in the red.

Valuation is key in the recapitalisation of Spain’s banking system, weighed down by massive bad loans accumulated in a property bubble that burst in 2008. Bankia/BFA is set to receive 18 bn euros of European aid, and become the country’s biggest bailout recipient.”

A little known fact about the Spanish crisis is that when the Spanish Government merges troubled banks, it typically swaps out depositors’ savings for shares in the new bank.

So when the newly formed bank goes bust, your savings are GONE. Not gone as in some Spanish version of the FDIC will eventually get you your money, but gone as in gone forever.

This is why Bankia’s collapse is so significant: in one move, former depositors at seven banks just lost virtually everything.

In addition, things are going from worse to worst, as bad loans in Spain continue to accelerate to massive new record highs.

Index of Spanish Industrial Output

Italy

In Jan 2012, Italy’s government believed Italy’s 2012 GDP would come in at – 0.4%. The actual in (Q3) – 2,4% (so far). Only a miss by 600%.

And the forecast for Italy’s GDP in 2013 is being lowered every month. Each one as inaccurate as the previous one.

The all too familiar story how the political elite, in their own words and documents, decided to deceive and actively lie to the British people in an all out effort to join the “common market”.

Here is a piece by Christopher Booker and Richard North (see below) on the deceit and active lying behind Britain’s entry to the EU in their, the politicians, own words.

“The real problem the British people have had with the ‘European project’, as its insiders call it, is that they have never really begun to understand its real nature, and what was always intended to be its ultimate goal.

The chief reason for this is that our politicians have never properly explained it to us.

What makes this so much worse is that those who were most enthused by it, such as Heath, knew full well what ‘the project’ was really about — the plan to weld all Europe together under an unprecedented form of super-government.

They deliberately decided to conceal it from us, for fear that our anxieties about our loss of sovereignty might prevent them from being allowed to join.”

“Thus, stealthily assembled over decades, would this new ‘country called Europe’ finally take its place on the world stage. What we found most shocking in researching this story was that, when Britain’s leaders first considered joining the project, they were made fully aware of this hidden agenda.

As we see from Cabinet papers and other documents of the early Sixties, Prime Minister Harold Macmillan and his ‘Europe Minister’ Edward Heath were put completely in the picture about the secret ‘grand plan’. But in June 1961 the Cabinet formally agreed that it must not be revealed to the British people.

In Macmillan’s words, to admit ‘the political objectives’ of the Rome Treaty would raise ‘problems of public relations’ so ‘considerable’ that they should be kept under wraps. It was vital to emphasise only the economic advantages of British entry.”

“On the day we entered, he told the British people on television that any fears that ‘we shall in some way sacrifice independence and sovereignty’ were ‘completely unjustified’.

This was a deliberate lie, as no one knew better than him and the senior Foreign Office official who two years earlier had written a secret paper on ‘Sovereignty’.

The paper chillingly spelled out how it would be the end of the century before the British people woke up to how much of their power to govern themselves and make their own laws had been given away — by which time it would be too late.”

We seen this sad story repeated in country after country. The same behaviour with few exceptions.

This relentless drive at ALL COSTS from the political elites, on purpose, for a political union and European super state regardless of the will of the people.

And if the people protest and object, as they have EVERY time they where ALLOWED to, it doesn’t matter! Run them over, force it through one way or the other as the examples from the last 40 years clearly shows.

“At first it should be presented as just a trading arrangement, the ‘Common Market’ set up in 1957 by the Treaty of Rome. But the essence of that treaty was to create the core institutions of what Monnet always intended should one day be the ‘Government of Europe’.

The idea was to work for ‘ever closer union’.

Treaty by treaty, it would take over more powers from national governments, based on the sacred principle that once power to make laws was handed over to Brussels it could never be given back.”

“The European Union is like a hospital where all the doctors are mad. It doesn’t matter what is wrong, the treatment is always the same – more integration – and it is always wrong. The best thing to do is never to enter it.

Once you are in, the best thing to do is to leave. If you can’t get out, you will probably die.”

I disagree with one thing this author says: “EU is the Stupid Empire”. EU is a POLITICAL project. The Euro is part of that political project.

A lot of EU’s decisions make no economic sense whatsoever. In that regard, Peter Hitchens observation that “EU is the Stupid Empire” is completely right. Not to mention the enormous cost to the common people of all these political motivated but economically disastrous decisions.

The economic side was always a way to “sell it to the people”. Step by step. So that the political agenda could be slowly, but steadily implemented. Until it was too late. The political elites new ALL along that had the EU project been presented to the people for what it really is, people in ALL countries would have rejected it.

BUT EU was on purpose designed this way. So that the people could not stop this political project.

Never forget that ALL the political elites, irrespective of party or ideology, in the EU countries were behind this. With very few exceptions.

One small example, before the referendum on the Euro in September 2003 in Sweden, ALL parties (with the exception of some communists, greens, socialists and some from the agrarian party, ALL big unions, ALL mainstream media, ALL the representatives of the business world etc was for the Euro. And they put massive financial and personal resources behind this.

But the Swedish people, wisely, rejected this with 56% to 42%.

In the latest opinion poll, December 2011, 87,6% of the Swedish people were against the Euro. 9,7 % for. (Update- one year later these figures are even worse).

They planned this, and wanted this. And they kept on purpose this real ideology behind the EU project well hidden from their citizens in their countries.

They kept everything on purpose, including treaties, SO technical and juridical that it was totally unreadable for the common people. Like the EU “constitution”.

Just to give one example of how meaningless the local parliaments have become:

In Sweden 65 to 85%, depending of which area, of “decisions” made by the Swedish parliament HAVE ALREADY BEEN DECIDED IN BRUSSELS.

I.E. The national Swedish parliament is in reality rubber-stamping Brussels decisions and implementing them.

That’s all!

And they cannot change even one syllable in these decisions. So much for “representing” the will of the people.

But of course, they are not telling us that. They pretend that ALL these decisions are made locally by the Swedish parliament as the “sovereign” representatives for the Swedish nation. When in reality they can, to the most part, only decide the colour of their on toilets.”

And sadly, and as usual, the mainstream media/old media has for the most part taken en active role in promoting this political union and the European Super State. Add to that, the press utter failure to inform the people of their respective countries how EU REALLY works. And what it means to people and the sovereignty of their countries.

Most journalists have no clue about the important “inner” bureaucratic gameand ”the machinery” where nearly everything is decided. Instead, we see these useless reports and photo ops when the prime ministers or finance ministers meet. When in reality 99,8 or 9 % is already decided before they meet. Most of it is just a “show”. Often “very dramatic” late in to the night.

And this is nothing new. We have seen so many different examples of this betrayal of journalist in their role as journalist. This is just sadly another.

Forty years ago today, in what was arguably the most fateful political move ever made by a British Prime Minister, Edward Heath took us into what was then called the ‘Common Market’.

Such a step had scarcely been mentioned at the previous General Election, and the British people had very little idea of what they were letting themselves in for, other than a trading arrangement that might make it easier for us to sell our goods to our Continental neighbours.

Four decades later, the picture could scarcely look more different. We have seen that supposedly cosy club we joined transformed, step by step, into a vast, bloated bureaucratic empire, imposing its suffocating rule over 27 nations.

We have also seen it plunged into the most destructive crisis in its history — one it has brought entirely on itself by its reckless dream of locking the countries of Europe together into the straitjacket of the euro.

During those 40 years the British have never been happy members of this club. Too often we have been out of step, and even bitterly at odds, with the rest — as in our refusal to join that single currency.

But today, as the EU’s inner core of countries drive towards ‘full political union’ in a desperate bid to save their doomed euro, the British now look at this swollen political monster with fearful bemusement.

Politicians of every party talk plaintively about the need for us to negotiate a ‘looser relationship’ with the EU, while opinion polls consistently show a growing majority wanting to leave it altogether — an option that even David Cameron no longer rules out.

Even on the Continent, influential voices are now recognising that something very significant is happening in Britain, as they suggest we should perhaps be allowed something never seen before — a mere ‘associate membership’ of the EU, allowing us to continue trading with it but without all its political superstructure.

How did we come to such a pass? Are we today looking at another historic crossroads, in its own way just as fateful as the one we faced back in 1973?

The real problem the British people have had with the ‘European project’, as its insiders call it, is that they have never really begun to understand its real nature, and what was always intended to be its ultimate goal.

The chief reason for this is that our politicians have never properly explained it to us.

What makes this so much worse is that those who were most enthused by it, such as Heath, knew full well what ‘the project’ was really about — the plan to weld all Europe together under an unprecedented form of super-government.

They deliberately decided to conceal it from us, for fear that our anxieties about our loss of sovereignty might prevent them from being allowed to join.

Ten years ago, with my co-author Richard North, I wrote a comprehensively researched history of the ‘European project’.

I had already been reporting for years on the incredible damage membership of the EU was doing to British life, through thousands of crazy directives and regulations, through the destruction of our proud fishing industry and the undermining of our agriculture, which was until 1973 the most efficient in Europe.

The real story, surprisingly, goes back to the 1920s, when a senior League of Nations official, Frenchman Jean Monnet, first began to dream of building a ‘United States of Europe’, very much on the lines that decades later would shape the European Union as it is today.

After World War II, Monnet, by then the second most powerful man in France, finally set the project on its way. He knew there was no chance of bringing such an astonishingly ambitious vision into being all at once. So his plan was that it should gradually be constructed, piece by stealthy piece, without ever declaring too openly what was intended to be its ultimate goal.

At first it should be presented as just a trading arrangement, the ‘Common Market’ set up in 1957 by the Treaty of Rome. But the essence of that treaty was to create the core institutions of what Monnet always intended should one day be the ‘Government of Europe’.

The idea was to work for ‘ever closer union’.

Treaty by treaty, it would take over more powers from national governments, based on the sacred principle that once power to make laws was handed over to Brussels it could never be given back.

Ever more countries would be brought into the net, until the project reached its ultimate goal as a super-government, with its own president and parliament, its own currency and armed forces, its own flag and anthem — all the attributes of a fully-fledged nation state.

Thus, stealthily assembled over decades, would this new ‘country called Europe’ finally take its place on the world stage. What we found most shocking in researching this story was that, when Britain’s leaders first considered joining the project, they were made fully aware of this hidden agenda.

As we see from Cabinet papers and other documents of the early Sixties, Prime Minister Harold Macmillan and his ‘Europe Minister’ Edward Heath were put completely in the picture about the secret ‘grand plan’. But in June 1961 the Cabinet formally agreed that it must not be revealed to the British people.

In Macmillan’s words, to admit ‘the political objectives’ of the Rome Treaty would raise ‘problems of public relations’ so ‘considerable’ that they should be kept under wraps. It was vital to emphasise only the economic advantages of British entry.

Thus did Macmillan and Heath become drawn into complicity with that same web of deceit which was driving the ‘project’ itself (which is why we called our book The Great Deception).

Twice in the Sixties Britain made failed attempts to join the project — but within weeks of Heath entering Downing Street in 1970, he applied to Brussels a third time. Scarcely had negotiations begunthan he learned that his future partners were already discussing the next steps along their path to full integration: a single currency, European defence forces, a common foreign policy.

Heath immediately sent word to Brussels pleading for all this to be kept quiet, because it might blow the gaffe with British voters.

For two years the negotiations continued, with Heath handing over all he was asked for, from giving away Britain’s fishing waters, the richest in the world, to become ‘a common European resource’,to the betrayal of our Commonwealth partners by excluding their goods from what had been for many their main export market.

Finally, Heath got what he was after: entry to the club — although he still pretended that the Common Market was little more than a trading arrangement.

On the day we entered, he told the British people on television that any fears that ‘we shall in some way sacrifice independence and sovereignty’ were ‘completely unjustified’.

This was a deliberate lie, as no one knew better than him and the senior Foreign Office official who two years earlier had written a secret paper on ‘Sovereignty’.

The paper chillingly spelled out how it would be the end of the century before the British people woke up to how much of their power to govern themselves and make their own laws had been given away — by which time it would be too late.

So began the dismal story which has been unfolding ever since. Already by the late Seventies, as the Common Market morphed into ‘the European Community’, we were becoming known in Brussels as ‘the awkward partner’.

Then came Mrs Thatcher’s five-year battle to win that rebate on our payments into the EU budget which, thanks to the ludicrously lop-sided conditions accepted by Heath, would have made us the largest single contributor by 1985.

In 1986 came the treaty called the Single European Act, which not only set up the Single Market but handed over to Brussels all sorts of other powers, including environmental laws which were to lead to everything from the shambles of our rubbish collections to building thousands of hated and useless wind turbines.

EBC Balance sheet

In 1990, nothing did more to inspire hostility to Mrs Thatcher among her European colleagues, led by Jacques Delors, than her defiant opposition to the Maastricht Treaty, designed to create the European Union, introduce the ‘social chapter’ and, above all, to launch the single currency.

As soon as he replaced her, John Major proclaimed his wish for Britain to be ‘at the heart of Europe’ and signed the Maastricht Treaty (admittedly with those vital opt-outs for Britain on the single currency and the social chapter).

But seven years later he ended up more at odds with his partners than ever, as they imposed their worldwide ban on the export of all British beef products over ‘mad cow disease’, tried to sneak us into the social chapter under ‘health and safety’ rules and laid their plans for yet another integrationist treaty in Amsterdam.

Tony Blair, too, wanted to be ‘at the heart of Europe’, as the single currency approached (which he would love to have joined), signing us up to the social chapter with its damaging working-time rules, and two more treaties, at Amsterdam and Nice.

But he too found it hard to keep up with that relentless drive for ever closer union, as it led to seven years of tortuous negotiation to create ‘A Constitution for Europe’,eventually sabotaged by the voters of France and Holland, so that it had to be smuggled in by deceit as the Lisbon Treaty (which, among much else, incorporated the Court of Human Rights into the EU). Scarcely was the ink dry on Prime Minister Gordon Brown’s signature on that treaty than the EU was plunged into its worst-ever crisis over the euro, which today is spreading misery across southern Europe.

As always, the response of the EU’s leaders has been to call for yet ‘more Europe’, and a new treaty to force the eurozone members into ‘full political union’.

This is now leaving Britain more obviously marginalised than ever, condemned to remain in the outer ring of a club, many members of which would now be only too pleased to see the back of us.

This humiliating prospect has seen our politicians running around like bewildered sheep, bleating about the need for Britain to negotiate a ‘looser relationship’ with the EU, to get back to that trading arrangement we thought we were entering 40 years ago.

Astonishingly, this is now even being echoed as a possibility by those influential voices in Europe itself — even though the most fundamental rule of the club we joined back then was that, once powers are passed to Brussels, they can never be given back.

As David Cameron prepares to give that ‘very important speech on Europe’ he has promised us very soon, he could not do better than to meditate on the shrewdest words ever uttered by a Prime Minister about Britain and Europe. In 1973, as a junior member of Heath’s Cabinet, Margaret Thatcher made all the approved noises about how wonderful it was for Britain to join this club.

Once in office, however, she went on a painful learning curve, as she saw from the inside just what the real game was and how ruthlessly it was played. She was brought down in 1990 by an alliance of Europhiles in her party and their Brussels allies, because she was the last real obstacle to their Maastricht Treaty.

What really riled them was that she had seen through their true agenda and the disastrous course on which they were set.

With even Jacques Delors, the chief architect of Maastricht, suggesting it might be best for Britain to leave the EU, Mr Cameron should dwell on a passage from her last book, Statecraft.

‘That such an unnecessary and irrational project as building a European super-state was ever embarked on,’ wrote Lady Thatcher, ‘will seem in future years to be perhaps the greatest folly of the modern era. And that Britain...should ever have become part of it will appear a political error of the first magnitude.’

If Mr Cameron truly wishes to speak for the British people and our country’s future, he should bear those prophetic thoughts in mind.”

“The piece serves to remind us that entry was perpetrated on the basis of structured deceit, with successive prime ministers (Macmillan and Heath) actively lying as to their broad intentions and the proposed relationship with the Six. “

“Those utter fools who assert that the relationship was primarily economic (and has since gone off the rails) need to read the Cabinet Memorandum of 21 June 962, (originally referenced C. (61) 84 and now CAB/129/105), in which Macmillan set out the purpose of seeking full United Kingdom membership of the European Economic Community, as ”… the only effective way of securing our political objectives in the world, and of averting the dangers of continued division in Europe”.

Then, in a note to his Cabinet colleagues on 10 October 1961 (Originally C.(61)162, now: CAB/129/107 – see above), Edward Heath asserted that the UK had been following closely the progress towards unity in fields other than those covered by the three communities.

He conveyed to his colleagues that it was the intention of the UK to work with the Six ”in a positive spirit to reinforce the unity already achieved”. Heath was ”convinced” that the UK and the Six ”share the same essential interests”, and that ”the habit of working together, once formed, will mean, not a slowing down, but a continued advance and the development of closer unity”.

From the very start, therefore, it was evident that Heath intended to take the UK into the EEC with a view to developing further political unity. The economic issues were always camouflage, and the label ”Common Market” was simply a ploy deliberately to obscure the real intent.

Cameron and modern-day politicians are now paying the price for that deceit, having to deal with a relationship founded on a bed of lies and poisoned by the continuing deception.

Such a situation is irrecoverable, which means there can only be one resolution – our withdrawal from the European Union. Simply, a relationship built on lies can never prosper, and can never be repaired. We need to start again to avoid what Thatcher called a ”the greatest folly of the modern era”.

And the first step starts with the admission that the EU and its precursors were never economic alliances. The economic aspects were always a means to an end, designed to secure political unity,something which has been foisted upon us by deceit, and of which we want no part. “

Or this is why the Euro is doomed. And after that EU – Yes we have NO Money.

On Saturday November 17, police officers from all over Spain marched through Madrid, protesting austerity measures and cuts. They even apologized to the public for arresting the wrong people. One of the slogans was:

”Citizens! Forgive us for not arresting those truly responsible for this crisis: bankers and politicians.”

The whole economic and political crisis in EU and USA summarized in one simple sentence.

“The European Union is like a hospital where all the doctors are mad. It doesn’t matter what is wrong, the treatment is always the same – more integration – and it is always wrong. The best thing to do is never to enter it.

Once you are in, the best thing to do is to leave. If you can’t get out, you will probably die.”

I disagree with one thing this author says: “EU is the Stupid Empire”. EU is a POLITICAL project. The Euro is part of that political project.

A lot of EU’s decisions make no economic sense whatsoever. In that regard, Peter Hitchens observation that “EU is the Stupid Empire” is completely right. Not to mention the enormous cost to the common people of all these political motivated but economically disastrous decisions.

The economic side was always a way to “sell it to the people”. Step by step. So that the political agenda could be slowly, but steadily implemented. Until it was too late. The political elites new ALL along that had the EU project been presented to the people for what it really is, people in ALL countries would have rejected it.

BUT EU was on purpose designed this way. So that the people could not stop this political project.

Never forget that ALL the political elites, irrespective of party or ideology, in the EU countries were behind this. With very few exceptions.”

The EU bureaucrats and the political elites always fall back, when they have nothing else to say in defence of the EU, that this is a “peace project”. Well this “peace project” has now created social havoc, riots, and put country against country, and groups of countries against group of countries.

Tearing apart the EU at it’s seems. And ALL of this because they, the political elites, literally AT ALL COST want to preserve the POLITICAL project euro. Which is the cornerstone of the federal super state of Europe.

As I have said before, this has nothing to do with economics; it’s ALL about politics,

And that is why so many people still don’t understand what is going on. Because from an economical point these policies are total madness. Ruining and lowering the living standard of most people. And the political elites know this. But the political project is MORE important.

Then there is Ireland, Italy, Portugal, Cyprus, France….

Just start adding up the GIGANTIC NUMBERS and be utterly horrified!

This is the situation that politicians and the banks have put the common people of Europe in.

They are literally ruining us all. And WE have to pay the price of their folly and speculations.

This is from the IMF’s World Economic Outlook (WEO) Notice the rising trend of the 27 Developing Asian economies as a share of World GDP. Bloomberg’s Chart of the Day notes that by the end of 2012, Developing Asia will account for 17.9% of World GDP, surpassing for the first time Europe’s 17-nation 16.9% share. The euro-area crisis has merely accelerated a trend that has been ongoing for several years – as former IMF board member Domenico Lombardi notes, makes it clear that euro-area economies need to address their structural reforms rapidly.

America is on the same path, as while China will top Europe by 2017 as a share of global GDP, USA will be passed in five years when Developing Asia will have topped the USA for the first time ever.

All graphs gets bigger if you click on it

Just one small example of all these stupid US policies, on Januari 1, 2013, dividend tax rates are set to rise from 15% to as high as 43.4%. This affects not only US taxpayers, but everyone on the planet who invests in the US stock market.

As a result of this tax policy, many investors who own shares in US companies will now see their after-tax dividends slashed by 33%.

This is putting a lot of downward pressure on stock prices, affecting almost everyone who currently owns US shares– pension funds and retirement accounts, rich and middle class, US and non-US citizens alike. It’s as if the US government is hanging a sign over the country saying ”PLEASE DO NOT INVEST HERE.”

One more small example, in this case the UK, national government borrowing is already 22% higher than at this same point last year, a record year for borrowing. Meanwhile, the UK‘s budget deficit for August hit a record high.

I hope you get the picture- it isn’t pretty!

And the unemployment picture

And let’s continue with Spain:

Spanish bad loans

The figures are just out for the total Spanish bad loans during September: the loans that fell into arrears, (the part of a debt that is overdue after missing one or more required payments), increased by €3.5 billion from August, reaching €182.2 billion in September.This is 10.71% of the total Spanish bank loans of €1.7 trillion, and an increase from the previous month.

Putting the bad loan number in perspective, it is nearly double the €100 billion that the Spanish banks will receive as part of the bank bailout plan disclosed in July, and well above the ”only” €40 billion that Spain promises it will need to actually fund bank capital shortfalls.

If you compared as a percentage of GDP, it would be the equivalent of $2.8 trillion in US loans going bad.

Let’s look merely on one data series: the brand new Debt/GDP, (ignoring the -4.5% 2013 GDP forecast, already – 0.5% worse than the just released IMF forecast for Greece for the same period, remember also that the May forecast of 2013 predicted ”growth”), and compared it to the Debt/GDP ”forecast” from May 2010, when the first Greek bailout was announced.

It ain’t pretty

The Greece Finance Ministry

This is the same Finance Ministry where the EU inspectors found this in their taxation archive section (see the video 5:20-5-48):

Watch this documentary from ZDF (in german). It shows where 2 ½ years of bailout funds went, or rather didn’t go. And why 2 ½ years to the day after the first bailout, not only is Greece not fixed, but is getting worse ata cost to taxpayers of nearly half a trillion Euro.

The troika (the European Commission, the International Monetary Fund, and the European Central Bank), which are supposed to get Greece’s financial future in order cannot make even the most basic forecasting. And the Troika have made these “forecasts” repeatedly, which are a complete and utter joke. But there is NO surprise here,this is ALL about politics. The same way that EU allowed Greece into the Euro knowing that every figure was false. But for political reasons they were allowed to enter.

And these “guys” are supposed to save Europe? Where all the important decisions are being taken on the ground of these “forecasts”?

The Greeceunemployment

Again, It ain’t pretty.

I could go on, but I think I stop here.

You get the picture.

And of course, none of this is covered in the mainstream media or by our “dear” politicians.

This is the situation that politicians and the banks have put the common people of Europe in.

They are literally ruining us all. And WE have to pay the price of their folly and speculations.

And after the Spanish bailout Ireland promptly requested a renegotiation of its own terms to match those of Spain.

And in six days there is the Greece election. Alexis Tsipras, leader of Greece’s leftwing Syriza coalition of course used this bailout to strengthening his party’s position.

“What we wonder is why did Europe cave to the Spanish demands before the Greek elections. Because, paradoxically, by yielding to a bailout plan, which at least superficially has been painted as one without conditions, it just cemented Syriza’s entire electoral platform as having absolute validity.

Then again, on the insolvent continent, nothing really surprises us any more.”

And of course, none of this is covered in the mainstream media or by our “dear” politicians.

“The European Union is like a hospital where all the doctors are mad. It doesn’t matter what is wrong, the treatment is always the same – more integration – and it is always wrong. The best thing to do is never to enter it.

Once you are in, the best thing to do is to leave. If you can’t get out, you will probably die.”

I disagree with one thing this author says: “EU is the Stupid Empire”. EU is a POLITICAL project. The Euro is part of that political project.

A lot of EU’s decisions make no economic sense whatsoever. In that regard, Peter Hitchens observation that “EU is the Stupid Empire” is completely right. Not to mention the enormous cost to the common people of all these political motivated but economically disastrous decisions.

The economic side was always a way to “sell it to the people”. Step by step. So that the political agenda could be slowly, but steadily implemented. Until it was too late. The political elites new ALL along that had the EU project been presented to the people for what it really is, people in ALL countries would have rejected it.

BUT EU was on purpose designed this way. So that the people could not stop this political project.

Never forget that ALL the political elites, irrespective of party or ideology, in the EU countries were behind this. With very few exceptions.

One small example, before the referendum on the Euro in September 2003 in Sweden, ALL parties (with the exception of some communists, greens, socialists and some from the agrarian party, ALL big unions, ALL mainstream media, ALL the representatives of the business world etc was for the Euro. And they put massive financial and personal resources behind this.

But the Swedish people, wisely, rejected this with 56% to 42%.

In the latest opinion poll, December 2011, 87,6% of the Swedish people were against the Euro. 9,7 % for.

They planned this, and wanted this. And they kept on purpose this real ideology behind the EU project well hidden from their citizens in their countries.

They kept everything on purpose, including treaties, SO technical and juridical that it was totally unreadable for the common people. Like the EU “constitution”.

Just to give one example of how meaningless the local parliaments have become:

In Sweden 65 to 85%, depending of which area, of “decisions” made by the Swedish parliament HAVE ALREADY BEEN DECIDED IN BRUSSELS.

I.E. The national Swedish parliament is in reality rubber-stamping Brussels decisions and implementing them.

That’s all!

And they cannot change even one syllable in these decisions. So much for “representing” the will of the people.

But of course, they are not telling us that. They pretend that ALL these decisions are made locally by the Swedish parliament as the “sovereign” representatives for the Swedish nation. When in reality they can, to the most part, only decide the colour of their on toilets.

”The European Union is like a hospital where all the doctors are mad. It doesn’t matter what is wrong, the treatment is always the same – more integration – and it is always wrong. The best thing to do is never to enter it.

Once you are in, the best thing to do is to leave. If you can’t get out, you will probably die.

Those of us who pay attention to history, politics and truth have known this for many years.

But as the EU’s ‘experts’ and ‘technocrats’ insanely destroy the economies ofGreece,SpainandItaly, it must now surely be obvious to everyone.

The EU, far from being a bright future, offers nothing but bankruptcy and decline.

If the old USSRwas an Evil Empire – and it was – the EU is the Stupid Empire. Obsessed with the idea that the nation state is obsolete, the EU has sought to bind its colonies tightly, while pretending they are still independent.

This is why what is essentially a modern German empire is not held together by armies, but by a sticky web of regulations and a currency that destroys prosperity wherever it is introduced (with one important exception, Germany itself, for whom the euro means cheap exports to Asia).

It is also why it has been built backwards, starting with the roof and ending with the foundations. Old-fashioned empires were at least honest.

They marched in, plundered everything they could cart away, killed or imprisoned resisters, suborned collaborators, and imposed their language on the conquered.

Other humiliating measures followed – forcing the newly-subject people to live according to the invader’s time, to pay special taxes to their new masters, to surrender control of their borders, to use the invader’s weights and measures, salute the invader’s flag and obey the invader’s laws.

Eventually, after a few years of imposed occupation money, set at a viciously rigged exchange rate, the subjugated nation’s economy would have been reduced to such a devastated and dependent state that it could be forced to accept the imperial currency.

The EU, which cannot admit to being what it really is, has to achieve the same means sideways or backwards. The colonial laws are disguised as local Acts of Parliament. The flag is slowly introduced, the borders stealthily erased, the weights and measures and the clocks gradually brought into conformity.

Opponents are politically marginalised, collaborators discreetly rewarded, armed forces quietly dismantled or placed under supranational command. It is happening before our eyes and yet, while the exit is still just open, we make no move to depart.

Irish economist David McWiliams, of Punk Economics, explains how EU has evolved from a democracy to a bankocracy.

In this illustrated video, he explains Europe’s (and US )’dirty little secret’ where economic policy is being run almost exclusively for the banks. And the political elite are becoming more and more detached from the people.

I disagree on one point; EU was never a democracy in the first place. It was never designed to be that by the political class/elites.

The Euro was always a political project. That’s why “they” haven’t done the ”proper” economic policies. Because these policies would undermine the political purpose of the Euro. So they, the political elites of EU, are trapped. And that’s why the Euro was domed from the beginning.

“How can brokeeconomies lend money to other broke economies who haven’t got any moneybecause they can’t pay back the money the broke economy lent to the other broke economy and shouldn’t have lent them in the first place because the broke economy cant pay it back”.

Even a 5 year old can understand this. But not “our” politicians and bankers.

In this to the point, pedagogic and very telling video (by Clarke and Dawe), the whole madness behind the euro and the present crisis in Greece,Spain,Ireland,Portugal,Italy, etc. is explained.

All thanks to our “dear” local and European politicians and banks (private and central banks, ECB) etc.

“Roger, Financial Consultant: They lent all these vast amounts of money to other European economies that can’t possible pay them back.”

“How can brokeeconomies lend money to other broke economies who haven’t got any money because they can’t pay back the money the broke economy lent to the other broke economy and shouldn’t have lent them in the first place because the broke economy cant pay it back”.

I think even a 5 year old can understand this. But not “our” politicians and bankers.

And remember this video was done a year ago. So now the situation (and the figures) is worse by a factor of two.

Thank you for ruining the common people in all our countries!

And this is on top of their efforts to drive us back to the Stone Age through the Global Warming Hysteria.

As always, a very refreshing and direct to the point speech by Nigel Farage in the EU- parliament on November 24(see video below):

“We don’t want that flag, we don’t want the anthem, we don’t want this political class, we want the whole thing consigned to the dustbin of history.”

“Just who the hell do you think you people are? You are very, very dangerous people indeed.Your obsession with creating this Euro-State means that you’re happy to destroy democracy. You appear to be happy for millions and millions of people to be unemployed and to be poor. Untold millions must suffer so that your Euro-Dream can continue.”

“If you rob people of their identity, if you rob them of their democracy, then all they are left with is nationalism and violence. I can only hope and pray that the euro project is destroyed by the markets before that really happens.”

As I have said many times:

The political elite in Europe DELIBERATELY constructed the Lisbon Treaty so that the common people COULD NOT UNDERSTAND IT and comprehend what was going on.

I.E. THE LARGEST TRANSFER OF SOVEREIGNTY AND POWER FROM the people and local governments to the EU central level.

And the people were NOT allowed to have their say and to vote on it. With one exception, Ireland. Its constitution made it impossible for the politicians not to have a referendum.

The result – the people of Ireland voted NO 54 to 46 %.

But of course – The political elite in Europe doesn’t accept a NO from the people.

They started their maneuvering, twisting, some minor concessions here some more money and transfers there etc.

At ALL COST they had to have a Yes on this one. And they got one a year later.

How many times does the voters have to vote NO before NO is really a NO? Or what part of NO! don’t you understand?

And a very INTERESTING Account of how former French President Valéry Giscard d’Estaing, in a meeting with Gorbachev in January 1989, told Gorbachev that Europe in 15 years time is going to be a FEDERALSTATE.

How in the HELL DID HE KNOW THAT??????

Well the answer is very simple – because that’s been the plan all along from the political elite in Europe.

And surprise, surprise, he become the author of the European constitution (2002-03).

Wouldn’t you say that that was another “lucky” coincidence?

Nigel Farage’s speech very accurately describes the EU mess and the consequences for the common people who have to pay the price for this elitist political project. But he is a rare exception – most politicians in the EU countries ARE STILL LOUDLY praising and singing the hallelujah choir.

Here in Sweden ALL political parties (except the new SD party) now support EU. The greens and the communists, who were opposed, now in practice accept it.

It is fantastic – The whole political class in every country has WILLINGLY AND GLADLY SURRENDERED their national sovereignty and power to EU AGAINST THE WILL OF THE PEOPLE IN ALL THESE COUNTRIES.

After the Lisbon Treaty the national parliaments are a mere joke and charade for local consumption, since 70-80 of all decisions now are all ready made and decided in Brussels. The national parliaments roll is in practice just to put a “local flavor” on what have already been decided in Brussels.

“Italy is a member of the EU. It is charged with running the government of Europe, through the European Council and other institutions, alongside our own government. Yet you have a government which can’t even sort out its own rubbish problems, and it is telling us, the British people, how to run our affairs.

In a way though,the experience is a more than adequate symbol of Europe – an expensive pile of festering rubbish, mired in corruption, surrounded by inept and impotent politicians, which is managing to piss of the local population so much that they are driven to rioting. We should be so proud to belong to such an exclusive club – and hope to share in the end game some time soon.!

As a complement to my previous posts on EU and the Lisbon Treaty, (see my posts:

If anything can be taken to define the ”European” experience, it is this amazing confrontation over the rubbish of Naples. Over this one issue, we have Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi vowing to put a stop to an ongoing dispute over whether to build another dump in a national park near Naples, after violent clashes between police and protesters.

As the rubbish piles up in Italy’s third-largest city, Naples, and at least 20 police offers were injured in violent clashes with protestors. Thus is Berlusconi forced to say: ”We expect that within 10 days, the situation in Terzigno can return to normal.” And this at a news conference in Rome after an emergency meeting – about rubbish? He needs an emergency meeting about rubbish?

What has triggered this is the government’s plans to build a new dump in Terzigno, which is located 20 kilometers (12 miles) southeast of Naples in Vesuvius National Park. This has for years met with fierce opposition by locals, who have repeatedly blocked access to the existing waste disposal site there. Then, on Thursday, police confronted around 2,000 demonstrators, who threw stones, marbles and firecrackers and used tree trunks to block access to the dump.

Berlusconi also announced he would release €14 million ($20 million) to modernize the existing facility, which the protesters say is overflowing and causing health problems.

The bigger problem, however, is that the site is overflowing with Camorra, the Naples version of the Mafia, who have taken control of waste management in the region. And while the current report refers to the crisis being a major issue for the Italian government for several years, with Berlusconi declaring a national disaster in 2008 – which is when we picked it up, also charting EU involvement – the problem goes back over 14 years. And still the Italians can’t sort it out.

Despite this, as we noted in 2008, Italy is a member of the EU. It is charged with running the government of Europe, through the European Council and other institutions, alongside our own government. Yet you have a government which can’t even sort out its own rubbish problems, and it is telling us, the British people, how to run our affairs.

In a way though,the experience is a more than adequate symbol of Europe – an expensive pile of festering rubbish, mired in corruption, surrounded by inept and impotent politicians, which is managing to piss of the local population so much that they are driven to rioting. We should be so proud to belong to such an exclusive club – and hope to share in the end game some time soon.

Above a short but very succinct description of the Lisbon Treaty and what it really means for the common people.

The EU’s president Herman Van Rompuy:

”Today, people are discovering what a ‘common destiny’ in monetary matters means. They are discovering that the euro affects their pensions, savings, and jobs, their very daily life. It hurts,” he said.”

The political elite in Europe DELIBERATELY constructed the Lisbon Treaty so that the common people COULD NOT UNDERSTAND IT and comprehend what was going on.

I.E. THE LARGEST TRANSFER OF SOVEREIGNTY AND POWER FROM the people and local governments to the EU central level.

And the people were NOT allowed to have their say and to vote on it. With one exception, Ireland. Its constitution made it impossible for the politicians not to have a referendum.

The result – the people of Ireland voted NO 54 to 46 %.

But of course – The political elite in Europe doesn’t accept a NO from the people.

They started their manoeuvring, twisting, some minor concessions here some more money and transfers there etc.

At ALL COST they had to have a Yes on this one. And they got one a year later.

How many times does the voters have to vote NO before NO is really a NO? Or what part of NO! don’t you understand?

And a very INTERESTING Account of how former French President Valéry Giscard d’Estaing, in a meeting with Gorbachev in January 1989, told Gorbachev that Europe in 15 years time is going to be a FEDERALSTATE.

How in the HELL DID HE KNOW THAT??????

Well the answer is very simple – because that’s been the plan all along from the political elite in Europe.

And surprise, surprise, he become the author of the European constitution (2002-03).

Wouldn’t you say that that was another “lucky” coincidence?

Below are just a small number of articles describing the EU mess and the consequences for the common people who have to pay the price for this elitist political project.

“UKIP health spokesman David Campbell Bannerman said: “People’s health and in some cases their very lives will be put at risk at the altar of being good Europeans.” Katherine Murphy, of the Patients Association, said: “It beggars belief that patients are to be put at such obvious risk from EU legislation.”

Safety tests on EU nurses working in Britain scrapped for being ‘discriminatory’

“Ministers are ready to hand sweeping Big Brother powers to EU states so they can spy on British citizens.

Foreign police will be able to travel to the UK and take part in the arrest of Britons. They will be able to place them under surveillance, bug telephone conversations, monitor bank accounts and demand fingerprints, DNA or blood samples.

Anyone who refuses to comply with a formal request for co-operation by a foreign-based force is likely to be arrested by UK officers. “

“Belgium has acknowledged that there will be a major battle over proposals to give the EU powers to vet budgets before they are presented to national parliaments.

Formal legislative proposals on ”budget peer review” and increased ”budgetary surveillance” to prevent another euro zone debt crisis will be tabled by the Commission Wednesday.

”There is a question of sovereignty if the role of the European Commission in economic government is reinforced,” admitted the Belgian source.

Belgian officials, with strong French and German support, are pushing hard to set up new EU supervisors to police financial markets, giving European authorities the power to dictate to regulators in the City of London. ”It is necessary to transfer some decisions away from national to European authorities,” said the source.

EU officials have warned British diplomats that the Lisbon Treaty means it will have to compromise on sovereignty because Britain does not have veto for either the budget scrutiny or financial market supervision measures.

Belgium is also ready to pick a fight with Britain over plans for new European-wide taxes to directly fund the EU independently of contributions from national treasuries.

”We can also explore, for example, the financing of European projects via new sources of revenue,” said the government source.”

“explained why the euro has always been a monstrosity, and why it will and must fail. Although the current plans to ”get a living corpse to walk” are touching, he scoffed, one thing is already clear: The euro bailout package will only save the banks.”

Wilhelm Hankel, professor for currency and development policy, Ministry for Economic Cooperation, the Foreign Office, chief economist of Bank for Reconstruction, the head of the department of money and credit in the Ministry for Economic Affairs and one of the closest staff members to the German economy minister Karl Schiller. etc.

”As was once the case before the outbreak of the French Revolution, Europe‘s politicians have now lost any sense for the rights, concerns and expectations of their citizens.”

Dieter Spethmann, the former CEO of the giant German industrial conglomerate Thyssen.

“He criticizes Berlin for demanding solidarity with Europe while demonstrating no solidarity whatsoever with its people. Hundreds of billions of euros are being destroyed in Germany ”because the country has taken on the role of the monetary union’s paymaster,” Nölling says. ”In violation of all laws, we are being forced to rescue a currency that cannot be saved.”

Wilhelm Nölling, former member of the Bundestag for the SPD, finance minister for the city-state of Hamburg and president of Hamburg’s state central bank.

“But he finds it undemocratic that citizens are simply being forced to be part of a community in which one country is required to bail out another. ”What is happening here is almost dictatorial,”

“This was done by permanent representatives, known as ”EU ambassadors” who met behind closed doors yesterday to sign off the amendment. The amendment must now be ratified in all the Union’s 27 countries and will require primary legislation in the UK – ”potentially opening up dissent among Conservative MPs who campaigned for a referendum on the Lisbon Treaty.”

Actually, though, it isn’t an amendment to the Lisbon Treaty. According to the EU Council, it is a ”protocol amending the protocol on transitional provisions annexed to the treaty on European Union, to the treaty on the functioning of the European Union and to the treaty establishing the European Atomic Energy Community.”

Now, if you can actually work out what that is saying, we are talking about an addendum amending an addendum which sets out changes to transitional provisions. It doesn’t even change a treaty. It simply changes the speed at which a previously agreed change to the treaty comes into force.”

Ordinary people were misled over impact of the euro, says Herman Van Rompuy

In the first public admission of the scale of the popular backlash, Mr Van Rompuy acknowledged that ”growing public awareness” of the euro zone’s problems was ”a major political development.”

”Today, people are discovering what a ‘common destiny’ in monetary matters means. They are discovering that the euro affects their pensions, savings, and jobs, their very daily life. It hurts,” he said.”

“The President of the European Council, the body that brings together EU leaders in summits, also confessed that the euro had been flawed from the moment of its creation in 1992, a situation that had not been made clear to voters.

”We are clearly confronted with a tension within the system, the ill-famous dilemma of being a monetary union and not a full-fledged economic and political union,” he said. ”This tension has been there since the single currency was created. However, the general public was not really made aware of it.”

“Vincenzo Scarpetta, an analyst for the pressure group, said: ”The euro zone crisis is not simply about economic failure but also a breakdown in trust between the political class and European citizens. The EU elite simply got it wrong on the euro.”

“What we are witnessing here is a judgment on the entire deceitful and self-deceiving way in which the ”European project” has been assembled over the past 53 years. One of the most important things to understand about that project is that it has only ever had one real agenda. Everything it has done has been directed to one ultimate goal, full political and economic integration. The headline labels put on the various stages of that process may have changed over the years, such as building first a ”common market”, then a ”single market”, finally a ”constitution”. But by far the most important project of all was locking the member states into a single currency.

This was always above all a political not an economic project, to be driven through at any cost, which was why all those ”Maastricht criteria” laid down to bring it about were repeatedly breached. But as expert voices were warning as long ago as the 1970s, when it was first put on the agenda, there was no way economic and monetary union could work unless it was run by a single all-powerful economic government, with the power to raise taxes.

As was advised by Sir Donald MacDougall’s report to Brussels in 1978, it could only work if, following the US model, between 20 and 25 per cent of Europe’s GDP was available to such a government, to enable a huge transfer of wealth from richer countries such as Germany to the poorer, more backward countries of southern Europe – and how ironically has that come about!

When the 10-year-long construction of the euro began in the 1990s, all these warnings were ignored. The cart was put before the horse. So fixated were the Eurocrats on the need to get their grand project in place that the ”rules” were treated as mere window dressing. The member states were locked together willy-nilly in a one-size-fits-all system, with a single low interest rate, enabling countries such as Italy, Spain, Portugal and Greece to live on a seemingly limitless sea of borrowed money. And now, entirely predictably, judgment day has come.”

As alarming as anything, with this tsunami roaring down on us, has been the sight of our new leaders preening themselves with their list of irrelevant little ”coalition policies” and babyish boasts about the ”greatest democratic shake-up since the 1832 Reform Act”, as if none of this was happening. As one analyst put it: ”They are like children let loose in the sweet shop, seemingly oblivious to the horrendous reality unfolding before us.”

”It is not just the Communists who are worrying about this. There are a great numbers of Portuguese who are concerned that this country built over the centuries, for better or worse, on a foundation of sovereignty and independence is endangered by accepting everything that comes from Brussels without a trace of patriotism. The EU’s claim of economic and social cohesion is just propaganda,” he told Publico. “

“It was refreshing to read ”The Euro Burns” by Michael Schlecht, Die Linke’s economic guru, arguing that the primary cause of Euroland’s crisis is ”German wage-dumping”. He shows from Eurostat data that German labour costs rose 7pc between 2000 and 2008, compared to 34pc in Ireland, 30pc in Spain, Portugal, and Italy, 28pc in Greece and Holland, and 20pc in France. Again, my loose translation.

Germany ran an accumulated trade surplus of €1,261bn over the period, while Spain ran a deficit of €598bn, and Portugal €273bn. This shell game was kept afloat by recycling German capital to Club Med debt markets beyond sustainable levels until it all blew up over Greece. The Club Med victims are now trapped. “

“The North-South divide within EMU has been allowed to go so far that any solution must now be offensive to either side, and therefore will be resisted. The euro is becoming an engine of intra-European tribal hatred. Brilliant work, Monsieur Delors.”

Less influence and a slower recovery: the dangers for Britain of crisis at heart of eurozone

“While every one of the 27 EU member states is looking to cutting public expenditure – some more than others – the EU is demanding a £6.3 billion increase in its budget to bring its spending ”into line with its new powers under the Lisbon Treaty.”

So much for the claim that Lisbon was a mere amending treaty, but then the ”colleagues” always have lived on a diet of lies, confident that when the chips are down, they can still hold out their hands and the member state governments will come rushing to throw money at them.

In the 2010/11 financial period, British taxpayers will have to hand over £7.9 billion – that is £7,900,000,000, or more than £400 for every household – to keep the ”colleagues” in the luxury they most certainly do not deserve, while the EU enjoys a budget of£113 billion for its 2011 financial year (which coincides with the calendar year).

This situation is beyond irony as the commission has been urging on member state governments cutbacks in their own finances, and – according to Bruno Waterfield – is calling for a six percent cut in British public spending by 2013.

At the same time, we are continually assailed by EU laws and requirements which further add to the cost of governance and daily life, all promulgated by institutions where profligacy is their middle name. And to this, we append our now ritual question – and the reason we do not rise up and slaughter them all is?

The question becomes less rhetorical with each passing day – the pics are of the Résidence Palace in Brussels, that £280 million monstrosity to house the European Council, symbol of being ”in Europe but not ruled by Europe,” as that idiot Cameron would have us believe.”

“It is easy to overcook the idea of the European Union being in crisis. It is always said—by its supporters and its critics alike—to be approaching one sort of exciting denouement or another. But then it passes, the caravan moves on and in time another potential disaster that can be negotiated around swings into view.”

“Even the death of the EU constitution, which seemed like a serious impediment to the progress of the project, wasn’t much of a setback in the end. It was simply reborn as the Lisbon Treaty.

The motive force behind the EU is integration and the creation of a continent-wide power block. National governments and the Brussels-based bureaucracyhave so much invested in advancing that cause that any obstacles will not be allowed to cause more than temporary interruptions. They have become expert at improvising ways to press on regardless.”

“Yes, after much wrangling a deal to support stricken Greece is in place, but only with the Germans enforcing strict conditions. This is a sticking plaster solution. What must come, logically, is something close to a form of economic government by those states that want to stay as the inner core of the euro. It might be called by another name, but that is what it will be.

And that leads to a full-blown political crisis for the EU itself. The choice for various countries then is between trying to be part of an inner core organized around the euro with coordinated fiscal policy, or standing outside it in a trading zone built on cooperation rather than coercion.

The Eurosceptics, in countries such as Britain, are just starting to realize this. The euro’s problems will force its strongest members into much closer integration than even they currently envisage. Other than breaking up the euro they can do nothing else—standing still isn’t an option. In this way that old discussion about there being two distinct Europe’s inside the EU is coming back rapidly into fashion. Sounds like it has the makings of a proper crisis.”

The EU has become a lumbering, unaccountable mess, says Christopher Booker.

By Christopher Booker, Published: 7:00PM BST 11 Sep 2010

The latest findings of Eurobarometer, the EU’s own polling organisation, show that less than half its citizens now believe it is a “good thing”. In many countries, its popularity is at record lows, and only 19 per cent see the EU as “democratic” (in Britain, Finland and Latvia this is as low as 10 per cent).

What makes this particularly ironic is that in 2001 the EU’s leaders issued their Laeken Declaration, admitting that the EU faced a crisis through its “democratic deficit”. Their remedy was the process designed to give Europe a “constitution”. After eight years of negotiation, obfuscation, lies and referendum-reverses, they got the constitution they wanted (although they had to disguise it as the Lisbon Treaty).The upshot of this tortuous attempt to “bring Europe closer to its peoples” is that those peoples see the EU as less democratic than ever.

Meanwhile, armed with its new powers, the inflated engine of our EU government rolls on, more power-crazed than ever. It is spending £800 million on setting up its new worldwide diplomatic service, with 100 of its officials earning more than our own shrunken and virtually irrelevant Foreign Secretary William Hague.

Also now on the table are the EU’s options for imposing its own taxes, the front-runner being a tax on financial transactions to which Britain, as a world financial centre, would contribute 70 per cent, more than 300 billion euros a year. Britain and the City will also be hit hardest by the EU’s seizure of control over the regulation of financial services.

Our Chancellor, George Osborne, has just conceded the EU’s right to “supervise” the contents of national budgets, taking away much of a power Parliament has exercised for centuries. Britain also seems likely to lose what remains of the EU budget rebate won by Mrs Thatcher, putting up our yearly contributions to the EU by another £3 billion – even though, for every £1 we get back from Brussels for our farmers, we already hand over £2 to farmers in other countries.

Theresa May, our Home Secretary, weakly claims that she wants reform of the European Arrest Warrant, when half of all those affected by it are being extradited from Britain. The EU’s response, in effect, is that we agreed to this travesty of justice and we must learn to live with it.

But no current issue better illustrates the bizarre nature of the system to which we have surrendered the power to run our country than the chaos inflicted on our hospitals by the enforced application of the EU’s working time directive. Led by John Black, head of the Royal College of Surgeons, medical professionals protest that this is threatening many patients’ lives.

Even the European Commission freely admits, in a recent “communication” to the European Parliament and sundry others, that its rules are, in practice, highly “unsatisfactory” and in need of urgent reform. But it adds that attempts to amend the directives have been going on since 2004 and that any chance of getting the reforms needed will involve so many consultations and negotiations that little is likely to happen for years.

Of course, if we still had the power to run our own country, this crisis in the NHS and much else besides could be sorted out within months, But since our Government seems quite happy to continue handing over even more powers to this crazy system, there is nothing we can do about it – until eventually the whole lumbering, labyrinthine, unaccountable, undemocratic mess implodes under the weight of its own contradictions.